The implications of the causal and ubiquitous use, by doctors health-workers and politicians, of the word 'patient' are here discussed. Given that the many implications of this noun do not include health or normality (rather the contrary), it is questionable who, if anyone, profits from its indiscriminate use--and its use, even, at all.

Angola’s difficulties in achieving macro-economic stability and economic liberalization have serious implications for private-sector development. Hyperinflation, and frequent policy reversal, constrain and distort investment in both the informal and formal parts of the private sector. But macro-economic instability arises in part out of mechanisms that subsidize powerful oligopolies, enabling t...

sweden and spain experiment with different provider models to reform healthcare provision. both models have in common that they extend the role of the for-profit sector in healthcare. as the analysis of saltman and duran demonstrates, privatisation is an ambiguous and contested strategy that is used for quite different purposes. in our comment, we emphasize that their analysis leaves questions ...

Published in the Review of Radical Political Economics, December 1997 THE RATE OF PROFIT AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM According to Marxian theory, the performance of capitalist economies depends above all else on the rate of profit. When the rate of profit is high, capitalism is relatively prosperous: business investment is high, unemployment is relatively low, and the living standards of worke...

The 2007 financial crisis has reignited the discussion on crises, their origin and possible remedies. At present the most influential thesis on the left sees the crisis as caused by underconsumption and recommends Keynesian policies as a solution. This paper argues that we should understand the crisis from the perspective of Karl Marx’s “law of the tendential fall in the average rate of profit”...

Area Editor: John H. Roberts Despite conventional wisdom that firm profits decrease with competitive entry, the empirical literaturefinds a number of situationswhere the entry of an equivalent-quality competitor into amarket led to higher profits for the incumbents. Our paper uses a standard linear Hotelling (1929)market to study how location choices affect the possibility that profits increase...