This article serves as an introduction to the others published in this thematic issue of the Cadernos de Saúde Pública. The author makes a brief historical review of the concepts, approaches and methodologies used to study the relationships between social determinants and health outcomes. By analyzing the current global movement around social determinants of health he emphasizes that the distin...

This article reviews fundamental economic concepts of enforcing environmental policies. It describes the basic economic theory of compliance with environmental regulations and reviews empirical tests of hypotheses that the theory produces. It also presents some conceptual notions about the efficient design of enforcement strategies. The article deals with enforcement of traditional command-and-...

Two recent evaluation studies undertaken for the European Commission, related to the LEADER Community Initiative implemented throughout the 1990s, have provided the basis for the issues discussed in this article. This programme was set up to encourage pilot experiences in the promotion of rural development in the problem areas of Europe, by introducing a set of distinctive features emphasizing ...

BACKGROUND Prospective health impact assessment is a new approach to predicting potential health impacts of policies, programmes or projects. It has been widely recognized that public policies have important impacts on health. In 1997, the Liverpool Public Health Observatory was commissioned to carry out a health impact assessment of the Merseyside Integrated Transport Strategy (MerITS). A seco...

I consider the interaction of trade and environmental policies in two canonical models: competitive general equilibrium (which I extend to allow for monopoly power in trade) and multi-period oligopoly (which I extend to incorporate a general pollution abatement technology). Despite the complexities of the models and the considerable differences between them, they have surprisingly similar impli...

Nutrition and related health issues are nowadays topics of general interest. The prevalence of overweight and obesity has increased with alarming speed over the past twenty years, being described by the World Health Organization as a global epidemic. An evidence-based approach to public health interventions should be based on the best available information. Given the substantial investment of s...

OBJECTIVES In this paper we focus on governance and the added value of regionalization in the context of health policy implementation. What are regional boards' patterns of action in the governance process?How do these patterns favour policy implementation? ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK: To enhance our understanding of the role of regional boards in governance processes, we relied on four conceptual con...

Government actors have an important role to play in creating healthy public policies and supportive environments to facilitate access to safe, affordable, nutritious food. The purpose of this research was to examine Waterloo Region (Ontario, Canada) as a case study for "what works" with respect to facilitating access to healthy, local food through regional food system policy making. Policy and ...

Using detailed sociological and public health qualitative interview data, we demonstrate that energy poverty is more pervasive, and results in a greater energy burden for low-income tenants, than many policymakers would assume. This is due in part to a lack of funding, policy non-coordination, and a lack of understanding of the social and economic benefits of energy conservation, energy educati...

The efficient decentralized provision of public goods requires that special interest groups, such as municipal unions, do not exercise undue influence on the outcome of municipal elections and local fiscal policies. We develop a new political economy model in which a union can endorse one of the candidates in a local election. A politician that prefers an inefficiently large public sector can, ...