The first part of this paper provides a broad evaluation of the performance of the Indian economy (including cross country comparisons) and highlights the economic crisis faced by India in June, 1991. This crisis proved to be a turning point for the economy, providing the impetus for the initiation of revolutionary though studied and pragmatic economic reforms by the then Congress government. A...

During the past thirty years a high proportion of all long stay hospital beds have been closed. The responsibility for those who would have occupied those beds previously has to a large extent been transferred from health to social services departments, or to family, voluntary and private care. The overall effect has been to prioritize acute medical care, and to expose the public provision and ...

Social policy matters have long been considered women's issues. Extant research has documented a strong link between gender and the policies of the welfare state in the legislative, executive and electoral arenas. Yet what determines the strength of this association has largely been left unexplored. Drawing on tokenism theory, this article proposes gender diversity at the group level as a key e...

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a period of uncertainty. Profits are being squeezed by increasing costs and competitive pressures, and new drug production is slowing down. This Perspective reviews two policies that could assist in realigning incentives toward genuine innovation while also keeping drug spending growth under check. Value-based pricing can incentivize genuinely new disco...

We thank Dr. Hicken for her commentary (1) on our article regarding disparities in the distributions of blood pressure across racial/ethnic groups in the United States (2). She correctly places our results, which largely show that proximate risk factors are inadequate to explain disparities, in the context of a larger body of literature that suggests that broader social determinants of health m...