BACKGROUND Following a situation appraisal in 2001, a six year mental health reform programme (Egymen) 2002-7 was initiated by an Egyptian-Finnish bilateral aid project at the request of a former Egyptian minister of health, and the work was incorporated directly into the Ministry of Health and Population from 2007 onwards. This paper describes the aims, methodology and implementation of the me...

Recent policy debates on the reform of social service delivery systems focus on the decentralization of services and the introduction of competition in order to improve the quality of services. Despite the common assumption that public sector unions oppose these reforms, their responses were diverse. This variation has an important impact on the passage and the final design of the reforms. This...

This article considers some of the effects of health sector reform on human resources for health (HRH) in developing countries and countries in transition by examining the effect of fiscal reform and the introduction of decentralisation and market mechanisms to the health sector.Fiscal reform results in pressure to measure the staff outputs of the health sector. Financial decentralisation often...

Why do some countries still experience high mortality rates and low health care sector effectiveness, thirteen years after the post-communist transition? Why have some been successful at addressing their health care needs while other left their public health in decay? This study attempts to answer the puzzle by looking at the role of World Bank assistance in the health care reforms of the Centr...

Developing countries have a hard time getting their health situation improved. Constant reforms in health programs, international cooperation in the sector from USAID and other partners, or World Health Organization programs did not make health improve as much as expected. Although statistics in health show improvement in the last ten years, there are a large number of people who do not have ac...

The collection of papers in this special issue has primarily been drawn from the papers representing the ‘‘Corporate Governance and accountability in the Public Sector’’ stream of the Seventh International Critical Management Studies Conference (CMS 7), which was held at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, in July 2011. The stream was inspired by international reforms focussed on the m...

Recent policy debates on the reform of social service delivery systems focus on the decentralization of services and the introduction of competition in order to improve the quality of services. Despite the common assumption that public sector unions oppose these reforms, their responses were diverse. This variation has an important impact on the passage and the final design of the reforms. This...

Starting in the late 1980s, many Latin American countries began social sector reforms to alleviate poverty, reduce socioeconomic inequalities, improve health outcomes, and provide financial risk protection. In particular, starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at strengthening health systems to reduce inequalities in health access and outcomes focused on expansion of universal health coverage, es...