This book provides a multi-disciplinary framework for developing and analyzing health sector reforms, based on the authors' extensive international experience. It offers practical guidance - useful to policymakers, consultants, academics, and students alike - and stresses the need to take account of each country's economic, administrative, and political circumstances. The authors explain how to design effective government interventions in five areas - financing, payment, organization, regu...

The Research Handbook on Decent Work in a Post-COVID-19 World is an essential read, assessing prospects for employment, labour standards and the organisation of work in the wake of the pandemic. Contributing authors cover key developments and challenges in the field, from low pay to social protection.This Research Handbook investigates topics that have become more prominent since the COVID-19 pandemic, such as telework and essential workers. The book’s five centra...

Island of Dreams: Environmental Crisis in Japan, the classic work that explores Japan's tragic environmental crisis, is back in print to celebrate the book's Fiftieth Anniversary since it was first published in 1975. This edition includes a new preface by the authors to show the relevance of Japan's past experiences with environmental pollution to today's global crisis.The book describes the human consequences of Minamata disease, PCB poisoning, and Japan'...

Starting in the 1990s, San Francisco launched a series of bold but relatively unknown public policy experiments to improve wages and benefits for thousands of local workers. Since then, scholars have documented the effects of those policies on compensation, productivity, job creation, and health coverage. Opponents predicted a range of negative impacts, but the evidence tells a decidedly different tale. This book brings together that evidence for the first time, reviews it as a whole, and ...

The third quarter of the twentieth century was a golden age for labor in the advanced industrial countries, characterized by rising incomes, relatively egalitarian wage structures, and reasonable levels of job security. The subsequent quarter-century has seen less positive performance along a number of these dimensions. This period has instead been marked by rapid globalization of economic activity that has brought increased insecurity to workers. The contributors to this volume distinguis...

The premise of this volume is that business regulations are expected to grow in the near future as a consequence of the emergence of a “(world) risk society.” Risks related to terrorism, climate change, and financial crises, for example, will penetrate all conditions of life. Increasingly, the decisions and actions of some bring about risks for many in this era of globalization. Controlling these risks implies managing the world through high-quality regulation, with a particular emphasis o...

The Global Monitoring Report 2015/2016, produced by the World Bank Group in partnership with the International Monetary Fund, comes at an inflection point in both the setting of global development goals and the demographic trends affecting those goals. This year marks the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the launching of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while the World Bank Group has in parallel articulated the twin goals of sustainably ending extreme poverty and...

Health Care in Canada examines the challenges faced by the Canadian health care system, a subject of much public debate. In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate ca...

It’s time to rewrite the rules—to curb the runaway flow of wealth to the top one percent, to restore security and opportunity for the middle class, and to foster stronger growth rooted in broadly shared prosperity.Inequality is a choice.The United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination. But the facts tell a different story—the U.S. today lags behind most ...

Regulation is often thought of as an activity that restricts behaviour and prevents the occurrence of certain undesirable activities, but the influence of regulation can also be enabling or facilitative, as when a market could potentially be chaotic if uncontrolled. This Handbook provides a clear and authoritative discussion of the major trends and issues in regulation over the last thirty years, together with an outline of prospective developments. It brings together contributionsfrom lea...

How government can implement more successful policies, more oftenFrom healthcare to workplace and campus conduct, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant. Ineffective policies are caused by deep structural factors regardless of which party is in charge, bringing our government into ever-wors...

Medicare has been a crucial part of Canadian identity for nearly fifty years, and it stands in marked contrast to the US health system. But these facts alone do not protect it from dismissive swipes and criticisms, claims that the system is unsustainable, and even proposals to change medicare's fundamentals. In Canadian Medicare, Stephen Duckett and Adrian Peetoom show that the shared values underpinning medicare still provide a sound basis for the system's design. While medicare remains a...