The current literature on the politics of social policy has two major shortcomings: health care reforms are undertheoretized and research on Anglophone Africa tends to neglect health reforms. To tackle this, a case study on Kenya presents (failed) re-forms such as universal or categorical free health care or the introduction of health insurance and the expansion of its coverage. The case study ...

Introduction Schools have seen significant reforms that have been linked to school improvement and effectiveness. These reforms have led to a situation where teachers have been the focus of school improvement. Systemic measures, such as strategic management, whole cohort testing and target setting have been developed to ensure that necessary reforms occur to improve student’s learning. What is ...

In 1999 the Victorian primary care and community support system began a process of substantial reform, involving purchasing reforms and a contested selection process between providers in large catchment areas across the State. The Liberal Government's electoral defeat in September 1999 led to a review of these reforms. This paper questions the reforms from a rural perspective. They were based o...

The Japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid-1990s. This article measures productivity in Japan’s steam power-generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978–2003. We estimate the Luenberger productivity indicator, which is a generalization of the commonly used Malmquist productivity index, usin...

Recent land reforms in China have sought to address fundamental problems with the Household Production Responsibility System such as land fragmentation. Primarily the reforms have targeted land productivity and grain output. However, the reforms have had a much broader effect on rural development as they have allowed a degree of household specialisation in non-grain activities both on and off t...

This paper explores school reforms as a moral voice, which speaks in a different language in each context. We used the comprehensive school reform in Finland as an example and asked how teachers talk about it. Five discourses were identified: the silence, the irony, the submission, the active resistance and the opportunities. The sixth discourse, ‘the commitment’, was used when teachers talked ...

The market-oriented health care reforms taking place in the Netherlands show a clear resemblance to the proposals for managed competition in U.S. health care. In both countries good risk adjustment mechanisms that prevent cream skimming--that is, that prevent plans from selecting the best health risks--are critical to the success of the reforms. In this paper we present an overview of the Dutch...

Since 2009, European central bankers have supported some reforms, in order to draw roadmaps to get out of the euro debt crisis. This paper tests whether the educational and professional background of European central bankers matter for the type of reforms each of them advocated. Through a textual analysis of public speeches delivered by the European central bankers, we draw a cognitive map for ...

Despite recent reforms and developments in Medical Education worldwide, a recent commentator described a significant decline in the quality of Libyan Medical Education, due to the lack of curricular reform and leadership [1], which is evidenced by a failure rate of over 50% in some exams [2]. Although this may simply be a reflection of the assessment process used, such failure rates must entail...

The Indian banking sector has undergone rapid transformation since 1991—the year India started a series of economic reforms. As part of the reforms, along with public sector banks, private sector banks started operations in the country. Due to the rapid reforms of the banking sector and the increased competition, Indian banks are now featured prominently on the global stage. Estimates indicate ...