Though reforms in the health sector have recently been common around the world, their success has, for a variety of reasons, been mixed. The paper aims to examine and explain the importance of human resources (HR) to the success or failure of health reforms using case studies from Russia, Zambia and the United Kingdom. Health sector reform often focuses on changes in financing or organisational...

Health sector reform is defined as sustained, purposeful change to improve the efficiency, equity and effectiveness of the health sector. Any change is not reform. Changes that affect at least two of the elements namely; health financing, expenditure, organization regulation and consumer behavior justify to be called as health sector reforms. Suggested reforms before introduction must undergo a...

Food law has played a central, contested role in defining the UK's post-Brexit identity as regulating and trading nation. Mapping reforms to key areas of food across retained EU law, UK internal market trade policy reveals profound reforms, an emerging, distinct approach law-making. We identify three themes: increased conferral regulatory powers functions Ministers, coupled with expansion so-ca...

Starting in January 2003, Germany implemented the first two socalled Hartz reforms, followed by the third and fourth packages of Hartz reforms in January 2004 and January 2005, respectively. The aim of these reforms was to accelerate labor market flows and reduce unemployment duration. Without attempting to evaluate the specific components of these Hartz reforms, this paper provides a first att...

Labour market reforms face very often opposition from the employed workers, because it normally reduces their wages. Also product market regulations are regularly biased towards too much benefitting the firms. As a result there remain many frictions in both the labour and product markets that hinder an optimal functioning of the economy. These issues have recently received a lot of attention in...

Imagine that you have been appointed as the chief of police in a certain district. You want the public to remember you as someone who brought down crime levels. As you enter the role, you face a decision whether to implement a large-scale police reform. Although you believe that the reform will lower crime in the long run, you realize that due to short-run fluctuations, things might get worse b...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the macroeconomic effects of parametric reforms. An adjusted Auerbach-Kotlikoff model is used to study the effects of decreasing replacement and contribution rates of the pension system. The first part concentrates on the macroeconomic effect of reforms. Our results indicate that reducing the replacement and contribution rates increase the capital stock and d...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms – privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main finding is a strong empirical relationship from reforms to FDI, in particular, from financial liberalizati...