Electoral heresthetics, or the manipulation of electoral systems to a political player’s advantage, had profound political consequences for post-communist transitional Poland. Choices of di¤erent electoral systems contributed ...rst to the fall of communism and later to the reclaiming of power by the postcommunists. Despite high stakes and top priority attached by political players to electoral...

It is a piece of idle senthentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, or prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application oflegal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in th...

This paper develops a theory of the interaction between appropriative conflict and economic growth. Appropriative conflict, as measured by the diversion of resources, is viewed as the cost of securing effective property rights. We identify conditions under which conflict rises or falls as the rate of economic growth improves. The main implication of the analysis is that if the quality of proper...

This report provides a review of the literature on priority setting in healthcare. It adopts an economic perspective on the problem of choosing the optimal portfolio of programmes that can be afforded from a limited national healthcare budget. The traditional economic approach, proposes maximizing health gain (however measured) subject to a budget constraint, which implies ranking programs acco...

BACKGROUND Maternal health remains a central policy concern in Vietnam. With a commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 target of maternal mortality rate (MMR) of 70/100 000 by 2015, the Ministry of Health (MoH) issued the National Plan for Safe Motherhood (NPSM) 2003-2010. In 2008, reproductive health, including safe motherhood (SM) became a national health target progra...

Children with inadequate or no parental care are at risk of being denied a caring and protective environment. The State has the main responsibility to ensure that appropriate legislative, political and financial measures are undertaken in order to provide adequate alternative care options “with priority to familyand communitybased solutions”. According to the particular needs of individual chil...

The lifetime prevalence of mental disorders has been estimated to be between 12.2% and 48.6% globally [1]. More than 13% of the global burden of disease for mental disorders is due to neuropsychiatric disorders, and over 70% of this burden lies in lowand middleincome countries [2]. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death globally for all ages [3]. Despite this burden, mental illness has t...

Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, countries with low antibiotic use and low antimicrobial resistance, issue yearly reports on antimicrobial consumption and resistance. In these countries the reports have political priority and aim to disseminate information and promote antibiotic strategies within and between countries.

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

The goal of achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) can generally be realized only in stages. Moreover, resource, capacity, and political constraints mean governments often face difficult trade-offs on the path to UHC. In a 2014 report, Making fair choices on the path to UHC, the WHO Consultative Group on Equity and Universal Health Coverage articulated principles for making such trade-offs i...