The authors study the impact of governance and administrative factors on communicable disease prevention in the Indian state of Karnataka using survey data from administrators, frontline workers, and elected local representatives. They identify a number of key constraints to the effective...

Corporatization, a hybrid between public sector ownership and privatization, is an organizational form that is increasingly being adopted in the social sectors. In the health sector, the high costs of public hospitals, new technological developments, changes in demand for primary and secondary...

There are three potential levels of government activity in the health sector: regulation, finance, and direct provision of services, with the government owning and managing hospitals and primary care clinics. Eid focuses on service provision. In recent years corporatization has been introduced...

Many different strategies have been proposed to improve the delivery of health care services, from capacity building to establishing new payment mechanisms. Recent attention has also asked whether improvements in the way health care services are governed could make a difference. These approaches...

The authors examine the role of governance-measured by level of corruption and quality of bureaucracy-and ask how it affects the relationship between public spending and outcomes. Their main innovation is to see if differences in efficacy of public spending can be explained by quality of...

The authors provide an overview of how different approaches to improving public sector management relate to so-called core or essential public health functions, such as disease surveillance, health education, monitoring and evaluation, workforce development, enforcement of public health laws and...

Transition literature has emphasized stabilization and enterprise restructuring. Both cross-country analyses and country-specific studies have tended to focus on fiscal stabilization and its indicators, highlighting the importance of quantitative fiscal adjustment to stabilization outcomes. Less...

The explosion of informal entrepreneurial activity during Mongolia's transition to a market economy represents one of the most visible signs of change in this expansive but sparsely populated Asian country. To deepen our understanding of Mongolia's informal sector during the transition, the...

The author analyzes decentralization reforms in the education sector in Latin America (their status, impact, and ongoing challenges) by making use of the accountability framework developed by the World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People. She starts by identifying three...

Recent international experience has shown that excessively complex administrative procedures, required to establish, and operate a business, discourage inflows of foreign direct investment. The authors present a new database on the administrative costs faced by private investors in 32 developing...