This commentary reflects upon the article along three broad lines. It reflects on the theoretical choices and omissions, particularly highlighting why it is important to adapt the multiple streams framework (MSF) when applying it in a socio-political context like Vietnam’s. The commentary also reflects upon the analytical threads tackled by Ha et al; for instance, it highlights the opportunitie...

This essay seeks to characterise the essential features of an equitable health care system in terms of the classical Aristotelian concepts of horizontal and vertical equity, the common (but ill-defined) language of "need" and the economic notion of cost-effectiveness as a prelude to identifying some of the more important issues of value that policy-makers will have to decide for themselves; the...

Migrant Ethnic Identity: Concept and Policy Implications With globalization, the size of migration and the value of ethnicity is rising. Also Cyprus undergoes a strong process of change while experiencing large inflows of migration. The paper investigates the challenges and the potentials of migration from a European Union perspective. It advocates for a new concept to measure the ethnic identi...

After nearly a quarter century of large budget deficits—causing the public debt to double from 20 percent to 42 percent as a share of GDP in the industrialized countries—the need for greater fiscal discipline appears to be reaching a consensus. Last spring a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed in the House of Representatives and came close to passing in the Senate—a swing ...

This paper argues that the implications of globalization for monetary policy come mainly through two channels: On the one hand, the many structural changes, which are associated with the globalization process, cause an increase in uncertainty surrounding monetary policy. This leads to an increase in uncertainty about how to interpret macroeconomic data/indicators and about the monetary transmis...

I want to congratulate the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for organizing a fascinating and thought-provoking conference. I applaud the Bank’s decision to establish a center to promote and support research in behavioral economics and concur wholeheartedly with the judgment that motivates these initiatives—that research in behavioral economics is broadening and enriching our understanding of deci...

Systems are becoming exceedingly complex to manage. As such, there is an increasing trend towards developing systems that are self-managing. Policy-based infrastructures have been used to provide a limited degree of automation, by associating actions to system-events. In the context of self-managing systems, the existing policy-specification model fails to capture the following: a) The impact o...