The United Kingdom's publicly funded National Health Service (NHS) is entering a period of transition due to a growth in private healthcare providers. In response, the NHS must become more competitive; identifying competitive advantage, best practice and adopting formal management methods. The...

Jobs created by small businesses represent the majority of employment opportunities created in the UK. Efforts to reduce long term unemployment might focus on the benefits of working closely with these businesses.The UK Government’s New Deal employment initiative, introduced in 1998, used wage...

Over 80% of Glasgow's community pharmacies provide a supervised methadone service to opiate users, but fewer than this provide a needle exchange service. Postal questionnaires were sent in 1997 and annually from 2000 to 2003 to every pharmacy in Greater Glasgow. The original aim of the...

This paper studies the impact of R&D spending on output as well as forecasting the impact of a regionally enhanced R&D tax credit on the 'user cost' (or price) of R&D expenditure and subsequently the demand for R&D. The example we use of a 'disadvantaged' region is Northern Ireland (partly...

What is already known on this topic • Cost containment through the most effective mix of staff achievable within available resources and organisational priorities is of increasing importance in most health systems. However, there is a dearth of information about the full economic implications...

We model the determinants of donations made to UK overseas development charities using panel data on charities’ donation income covering a 25 year period. The paper starts by reviewing relevant theory and previous empirical work on donations to UK charities before outlining a framework in...

Infolge der Expansion der Bereiche Gesundheit, Bildung und Soziales in den Sozialstaaten während der letzten Dekaden ist die Erwerbsbeteiligung von Frauen gestiegen. Ist damit - so fragt Meyer in diesem Buch - auch die soziale Ungleichheit von Frauen und Männern reduziert worden? Im Vergleich...

This paper takes both a practical and critical view of economic analysis in relation to the third sector. It argues that there is no one kind of economic analysis but that a certain form of such thinking, and associated techniques, has become dominant in thinking and practice. That mainstream...

The global financial crisis was triggered by the bursting of the United States housing bubble in 2007 and the reverberations of this are now being felt throughout the world. The crisis was greatly exacerbated by the behaviour of banks, which has inevitably made the position of any country that...

We study three topics on corruption that are of particular relevance to sub-Saharan Africa. Firstly, we address the question of why corruption is such an endemic problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Is it policy driven or "destiny"? We analyse indices of perceived corruption and test several theories...