Aim. To describe health care reforms and analyze the transition of the health care system in Romania in the 19892001 period. Method. We analyzed policy documents, political intentions and objectives of health care reform, described new legislation, and presented changes in financial resources of the health care system. Results. The reforms of the health care system in Romania have been realized...

What kinds of policies can governments adopt to attract, retain, motivate and develop qualified teachers in elementary and secondary schools? The project will pursue two avenues to address this question. The first component will study the effect of recent reforms on the teaching profession in four countries. Some of these reforms involve increases in compensation linked to specific teacher beha...

In recent years African countries have faced a barrage of policy advice backed with financial support from development partners urging them to implement ‘good governance’ reforms. Good governance has come to mean support for improving the enforcement of property rights, the rule of law, fighting corruption and improving accountability. These reforms have enjoyed broad support because many of th...

This paper illustrates how advocates for gender equity succeeded in influencing the restructuring of the health system in Bangladesh in the mid-1990s but failed to influence its implementation. Using published and unpublished documents and personal interviews, it traces the changing fortunes of health sector reforms and reform advocates from 1995 to 2002 and analyses the major challenges and st...

The European Commission has developed an analysis of supplementary pensions which constructs the policy area as regulatory by separating ‘allocative’ issues, such as smoothing lifetime income and promoting saving, from traditional ‘redistributive’ or ‘budgetary’ welfare concerns, such as ensuring an adequate minimum income. In the allocative sphere, it promotes market-oriented values, notably ‘...

This paper introduces the concept of a steepest ascent tariff reform for a small open economy. By construction, it is locally optimal in that it yields the highest gain in utility of any feasible tariff reform vector of the same length. Accordingly, it provides a convenient benchmark for the evaluation of the welfare effectiveness of other tariff reform proposals. We develop the properties of t...

We construct a model of policy reform in which two players continually search for Pareto improving policies. The players have imperfect control over the proposals that are considered. Inefficient gridlock takes place due to the difficulty in finding moderate policies. The reform process is path dependent, with early agreements determining long-run outcomes. The process may also be cyclical, as ...