A market made up of health care financing and delivery plans and individual consumers, without a carefully drawn set of rules to mitigate market failures, and without mediation by collective action on the demand side, cannot produce efficiency and equity. The concept of competition that can achieve these goals, at least to a satisfactory approximation, is managed competition, with intelligent a...

Recently, we published the 2010 Health Systems in Transition review for the Netherlands.1 It is the first attempt to give a full blown description of the Dutch health system after major health reform in 2006. This reform, introduced after almost two decades of preparation, has brought important new regulatory mechanisms and structures to the Dutch health system. The reform can be seen as the re...

The Italian national health services is under criticism. Although recent legislative changes are intended to introduce managed competition, there is no clear epidemiological view of the health care needs and priorities. Several inconsistencies and inequalities (particularly between the northern and the southern regions) are obvious, both in the health status of the population and in the provisi...

Internet has tremendous potential for creating business opportunities. Travel agencies should take advantage of the Internet and refocus their business strategies to maintain their competitiveness in order to avoid being replaced. The purpose of this study is to explore agents’ attitudes towards Internet applications and also to find out the current state of Internet use and the relative maturi...

This paper applies several of the product space tools of Hausmann, Klinger, and Hidalgo to explain and predict the pattern of Brazil’s exports. First, we calculate an annual measure of distance between moderately disaggregated products. Then we fit an econometric model that predicts the next products in which each country will gain comparative advantage, based on this distance measure, domestic...