This paper examines the impact of the form of government—–presidential or parliamentary—–on fiscal outcomes in democratic systems. Based on data for democracies in 98 countries between 1970 and 2002, it shows that the gross domestic product ratio of the central government budget balance is higher in presidential than in parliamentary democracies. It also shows that this impact is not due to the...

The anemic pace of the recovery of the U.S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation’s fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on different industries, to the extent that industries differ in their exposure to government policies. This study utilizes industry ...

OBJECTIVES This article analyzes the content and outcome of ongoing health reforms in Latin America: Universal Health Coverage with Health Insurance, and the Universal and Public Health Systems. It aims to compare and contrast the conceptual framework and practice of each and verify their concrete results regarding the guarantee of the right to health and access to required services. It identif...

In our paper we aim to identify which individual characteristics form environmental policy attitudes and use data gathered in the European Value Survey in 2008 to empirically test our findings. Knowing voters’ motivation provides valuable insights into how to establish more efficient environmental policies. Furthermore, based upon the results of our literature analysis, we take a deeper look in...

Sector-wide approaches (SWAps) in health were developed in the early 1990s in response to widespread dissatisfaction with fragmented donor-sponsored projects and prescriptive adjustment lending. SWAps were intended to provide a more coherent way to articulate and manage government-led sectoral policies and expenditure frameworks and build local institutional capacity as well as offer a means to...

This systematic review aimed to collect and synthesize information available on immunization policy making processes in countries across the globe. Twenty-nine published articles and five websites in either English or French provided varied information on the immunization policy making processes in 33 countries. The information retrieved varied from players involved to types of evidence used wh...

Although Africa's health research capacity is still weak, African R&D institutions are contributing immensely to the development of health policies, guidelines and products essential for diagnosis, treatment, prevention and control of Africa's leading health problems. In order to increase Africa's contributions, all health research stakeholders should participate in setting health research prio...

background government policy measures have a key role to play in the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases (ncds). the caribbean, a middle-income region, has the highest per capita burden of ncds in the americas. our aim was to examine policy development and implementation between the years 2000 and 2013 on ncd prevention and control in barbados, and to investigate factors promotin...