The cost of health insurance has been the primary concern of small business owners for several decades. State small group health insurance reforms, implemented in the 1990s, aimed to control the variability of health insurance premiums and to improve access to health insurance. Small group reforms only affected firms within a specific size range, and the definition of the upper size threshold f...

The measurement and management of performance in the public services has become increasingly prominent in the past twenty years, and progressively more so under the New Labour Government. In July 2000, the government devised a ten-year plan for the National Health Service (NHS) to radically reform and improve the performance and cost efficiency of the service. Concerns about high levels of publ...

The adoption of web-based technologies to deliver government services has become a global trend in public administration. E-government inherits the administrative reform policies inspired by New Public Management (NPM) reforms implemented throughout the EU over the past twenty years. However, egovernment aims at going beyond NPM reforms, since its goal is to transform the relationships between ...

During the past few years, a new wave of reform has been launched under the rubric of reinventing government. Yet, despite the hype, little is known about the extent to which reinventing government is a reality across the country. The authors undertake a systematic analysis of reform activity in a large sample of suburban municipalities and find low rates of adoption of current reforms. Althoug...

In the Netherlands, the second decade of the nineteenth century not only saw the end of the socalled 'French period', but also the publication of a Dutch version of Lindley Murray's English Grammar. Is there any relation between the two ? One might argue that there was. In 1795, when Murray's English grammar was published in York, the federalist Republic of the Seven United Provinces was transf...

After the 1991 economic policy made a shift from a closed economic model to a market-oriented model. The government invited private sector to participate in reforming its telecom sector. However, the government took a half-hearted approach in overhauling the legal and regulatory regime, suitable for competitive regime or in framing the 1994 Telecom Policy. Competition was allowed in cellular an...

In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We calibrate a neoclassical monetary economy to match important features of the U.S. economy and use it to provide a quantitative assessment of the wel...

Using a sample of Chinese state-owned enterprises spanning 1980 to 1994, we investigate the factors that determine the sources of finance for firm-level fixed investment, including retained earnings, bank finance, and government transfers. Direct government transfers were not significantly associated with profitability throughout the period. In contrast, bank finance was positively linked to bo...