The democratization that took place in Japan over the latter half of the twentieth century led to local governments achieving a degree of autonomy that allowed them to manage aspects of public policy in such areas as regional development, welfare, environmental development, and government information disclosure. As these local authorities increasingly became active players in the policymaking p...

neoliberal approach with the aim to promote development in different countries has particular implications. it can be cited as monetary and financial system reform, privatization, elimination of barriers to trade and foreign investment. hence, from the beginning of the post-soviet, central asian countries adopted different approaches towards economic reform and moved towards a free market with ...

E-government and related Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are commonly understood to provide a great opportunity to innovate the business of government by fostering efficiency and reforming public management. This paper argues that the main approaches and methodologies used for the development of egovernment applications, services and infrastructure overlook the potential to provi...

Driven by high government deficits and an unevenly distributed tax burden, recent debates on economic policy have revolved mostly around reforms in the American tax codes. Consumption tax reforms are considered to circumvent the efficiency-equity tradeoff that other reforms might encounter. This paper studies long run consequences of changing to a consumption tax regime, as well as short run we...

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 Using published and unpublished documents and personal interviews, it traces the changing fortunes of health sector reforms and reform advocates from 1995 to 2002 and analyses the major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 defeat of the Shipley National government in 1999 marked the end of a fifteen-year experiment in which New Zealand governments undertook some of the most radical free-market reforms ever attempted in a developed economy. Although some reforms produced the desired outcome, it is now clear that the reforms as a whole did not produce the results hoped for by their advocates. New Zealand's econ...

This article examines the role of health governance in shaping the outcomes of healthcare reforms in China. The analysis shows that the failure of reforms during the 1980s and 1990s was in part due to inadequate attention to key aspects in health governance, such as strategic interactions among government, providers and users, as well as incentive structures shaping their preferences and behavi...