The idea of performance contracting or performance based contracting has become increasingly popular in the child welfare arena. This isn’t surprising, in that it comes on the heels of two very powerful shifts in the provision of child welfare services since the early 1990s: a rapid growth in privatization and the emergence of major accountability efforts from the federal government in the form...

This article analyzes why people in the United States have major problems in accessing medical care that are due to financial constraints. The author suggests that the cause of these problems is the way in which medical care and elections are funded in the United States, with private sources being the largest component in the funding of both activities. The article includes a comparison of fund...

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The interaction between: (i) political constraints, in part based on notions of “nation building,” and independence; (ii) the development of a suitable legal and regulatory environment; and (iii) economic constraints such as a growing state budget deficit and a recent banking crisis, are the subject of this paper. The paper will review and discuss the main political economy and competition issu...

We test the hypothesis whether gradual privatization with a soft credit constraint to enterprises with state ownership (ESOs) implies slow restructuring. The transition economics literature does not study restructuring and financial constraints to investment jointly. We provide such an analysis using a panel of Latvian firms in the years 1993-1997. We find that firms have been downsizing their ...