Over the period 1997 to 2000, the Australian government introduced two waves of price subsidies, then liberalised regulation to encourage private health insurance. Most of the increase in coverage occurred after the liberalization. Thus, it appears that this policy change rather than the earlier subsidies, explains most of the increase. We explore the relative impact of the different policy cha...

In a recent article in the American Economic Review, Kyle Bagwell and Robert W. Staiger (1999, hereafter B & S) have made a major contribution to answering the oft-posed puzzle (p. 215): What can governments gain from a trade agreement? Their answer is that:. .. a trade agreement is appealing provided that an inefficiency. .. exists under unilateral tariff setting.. .. Previous authors have est...

During the past few years the landscape of Canadian physician reimbursement policy has undergone dramatic change. Rapidly eroding fiscal environments for provincial (and federal) governments have forced provinces to "get serious" about controlling a significant, previously uncontrolled, budget line: physician expenditures. All provinces now impose medical expenditure caps, with eight of these b...

Water and sanitation services for the very poor remain grossly deficient over large areas of the globe, and financing water and sanitation improvements for these people remains a major challenge. This paper proposes six Key Solutions to overcome this challenge. We urge financing institutions, governments and service providers worldwide to put these Key Solutions into practice: 1) Use life-cycle...

Why do so many African governments consistently impose high tax rates and make little investment in productive public goods when alternative policies could yield greater tax revenues and higher national income? We posit and test an intertemporal political economy model in which the government sets tax and R&D levels while investors respond with production. Equilibrium policy and growth rates de...