This paper spells out the vision of the World Bank on how to strenghten worldwide health systems and ensure better responses to key challenges such as combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic, repositioning ...nutrition on the development agenda, and renewing commitment on population policy. This strategy also entails stronger analytical and operational work in these important areas.
This book conducts a micro-level analysis of various determinants of infrastructure sector performance that affect development. This book focuses on the distribution segment of three basic ...infrastructure services: electricity, water and sanitation, and fixed telecommunications. This books aims to answer four main sets of questions: what are the main performance trends in the region, and how heterogeneous are they?; how does the performance of state-owned and private utilities differ?; how does the institutional design of regulatory agencies affect sector performance?; and what management mechanisms create incentives for improved performance?. This book begins by describing the main elements that characterize sector performance, defined as the delivery of reliable, affordable service that complies with certain quality standards. It focuses on the relationship between sector performance and the following determinants: private sector participation, regulatory agencies, and corporate governance. It also examines related aspects, such as contract design, market structure, and, for telecommunications, market competition. This book first explains the dynamics of utility performance and the interactions between key internal variables and utility performance in each sector. The book is organized as follows: chapter one is introduction. Chapter two outlines changes in the electricity distribution, water and sanitation, and fixed telecommunications sectors in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region over the past 15 years. This chapter tells multiple stories of the substantial improvement in these sectors and fills in knowledge gaps by benchmarking utility performance at the regional, country, and utility levels. Chapter three synthesizes the impact private sector participation has had on electricity distribution, water and sewerage, and fixed-line telecommunications. This chapter also identifies whether private sector participation characteristics such as the sale method; investor nationality; and award criterion affect performance. Chapter four explores the institutional design of regulatory agencies and the link between regulatory governance and sector performance. Chapter five assesses the governance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in infrastructure, based on survey results from 45 SOEs in the water and electricity distribution sector of LAC. Chapters six examines other potential determinants for sector performance, including corruption, cost recovery, contract arrangements, and competition. Chapter seven summarizes the book s main results and describes the array of possibilities for moving forward.
For centuries, Asian immigrants have been making vital contributions to the cultures of North and South America. Yet in many of these countries, Asians are commonly viewed as undifferentiated racial ..."others," lumped together aschinosregardless of whether they have Chinese ancestry. How might this struggle for recognition in their adopted homelands affect the ways that Asians in the Americas imagine community and cultural identity?
The essays inImagining Asia in the Americasinvestigate the myriad ways that Asians throughout the Americas use language, literature, religion, commerce, and other cultural practices to establish a sense of community, commemorate their countries of origin, and anticipate the possibilities presented by life in a new land. Focusing on a variety of locations across South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and the United States, the book's contributors reveal the rich diversity of Asian American identities. Yet taken together, they provide an illuminating portrait of how immigrants negotiate between their native and adopted cultures.
Drawing from a rich array of source materials, including texts in Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Gujarati that have never before been translated into English, this collection represents a groundbreaking work of scholarship. Through its unique comparative approach,Imagining Asia in the Americasopens up a conversation between various Asian communities within the Americas and beyond.
Why do lenders time and again loan money to sovereign borrowers who promptly go bankrupt? When can this type of lending work? As the United States and many European nations struggle with mountains of ...debt, historical precedents can offer valuable insights.Lending to the Borrower from Helllooks at one famous case--the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, Mauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth analyze the lessons from this important historical example.
Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, Drelichman and Voth examine the incentives and returns of lenders. They provide powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults--they thrive. Drelichman and Voth also demonstrate that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The authors unearth unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times.
A fascinating story of finance and empire,Lending to the Borrower from Helloffers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.
How has New Public Management influenced social policy reform in different developed welfare states? New managerialism is conceptualized as a paradigm, which not only shapes the decision-making ...process in bureaucratic organizations but also affects the practice of individuals (citizens).
Public administrations have been expected to transform from traditional bureaucratic organizations into modern managerial service providers by adopting a business model that requires the efficient and effective use of resources. The introduction of managerial practices, controlling and accounting systems, management by objectives, computerization, service orientation, increased outsourcing, competitive structures and decentralized responsibility are typical of efforts to increase efficiency. These developments have been accompanied by the abolition of civil service systems and fewer secure jobs in public administrations.
This book provides a sociological understanding of how public administrations deal with this transformation, how people’s role as public servants is affected, and what kind of strategies emerge either to meet these new organizational requirements or to circumvent them. It shows how hybrid arrangements of public services are created between the public and the private sphere that lead to conflicts of interest between private strategies and public tasks as well as to increasingly homogeneous social welfare provision across Europe.
From President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972 to the aftermath of the Tiananmen tragedy, this book examines the changing perceptions of the United States articulated by China's "America ...Watchers, " whose occupation is to interpret the "beautiful imperialist" for China's elite and public. While other studies have looked at the behavioral history of U.S.-China relations, this is the first to probe the perceptual dimension.
Cheap and Clean Ansolabehere, Stephen; Konisky, David M
08/2014
eBook
How do Americans think about energy? Is the debate over fossil fuels highly partisan and ideological? Does public opinion about fossil fuels and alternative energies divide along the fault between ...red states and blue states? And how much do concerns about climate change weigh on their opinions? In Cheap and Clean, Stephen Ansolabehere and David Konisky show that Americans are more pragmatic than ideological in their opinions about energy alternatives, more unified than divided about their main concerns, and more local than global in their approach to energy. Drawing on extensive surveys they designed and conducted over the course of a decade (in conjunction with MIT's Energy Initiative), Ansolabehere and Konisky report that beliefs about the costs and environmental harms associated with particular fuels drive public opinions about energy. People approach energy choices as consumers, and what is most important to them is simply that energy be cheap and clean. Most of us want energy at low economic cost and with little social cost (that is, minimal health risk from pollution). The authors also find that although environmental concerns weigh heavily in people's energy preferences, these concerns are local and not global. Worries about global warming are less pressing to most than worries about their own city's smog and toxic waste. With this in mind, Ansolabehere and Konisky argue for policies that target both local pollutants and carbon emissions (the main source of global warming). The local and immediate nature of people's energy concerns can be the starting point for a new approach to energy and climate change policy.
This volume provides an analytical framework and operational approaches needed for the implementation of results-based accountability. The volume makes a major contribution to the literature on ...public management and evaluation. Major subject areas covered in this book include: performance based accountability, e-government, legal and institutional framework to hold government to account; fighting corruption; external accountability and the role of supreme audit institutions on detecting fraud and corruption.
Handbook Integrated Care Amelung, Volker; Stein, Viktoria; Goodwin, Nicholas ...
2017, 2017-06-30
eBook
Odprti dostop
Gives profound insight into the main ideas and concepts of integrated care. It offers a managed care perspective with a focus on patient orientation, efficiency, and quality by applying widely ...recognized management approaches to the field of health care. The handbook also provides international best practices and shows how integrated care does work throughout various health systems. The delivery of health and social care is characterised by fragmentation and complexity in most health systems throughout the world.
