This paper argues that the on-going reforms to the UK's National Health Service initiated in the 1990s represent potentially profound institutional change to the values underpinning the process of care. The market-orientation of the reforms is highlighted, and it is asserted that the theoretical...

Through analysis of the French experience, this article explores the way economic policy has sought to encourage active, well-informed patients by giving them market power. The new status of the patient as consumer is based on two foundations: the endeavour to build a healthcare market and the...

This paper quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI). Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 we show that pre-accession incentives provided by EU and...

This paper examines how the rise of a market economy in urban China redefines the rules governing economic activities and affects on earnings inequality. We identify three causal mechanisms linked to institutional change that are transforming the firm's employment practices: the higher marginal...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of institutional change on the evolution of the Italian bank branch distribution. As a consequence of the “liberalisation†of the late 1980s and early 1990s, banks were free to open new branches in their preferred locations, without...

In recent years, the local government sector in European countries has undergone important changes involving, among other things, the externalisation of local public service provision through various forms of corporatisation, public-public collaboration, public-private partnerships and...

This article examines two drastic changes in the performance of local water associations in providing local public goods – appropriate levels of water table – in the reclamation system in the Powiat Pyrzyce in the Voivodship Zachodniopomorski in northwest Poland. Employing an institutional...

The author employs a model in which the direction of technical change is induced by changes in relative resource endowments to interpret the trajectories of technical change in both developed and developing country agriculture. An international agricultural research system, an institutional...

This study introduces a framework for managing information flow in innovation systems. An organisation's capacity to receive information, to share it with others and to learn from it is assumed to be the key factor that shapes the flow patterns and, hence, the performance of the innovation...

This paper aims at explaining the role and importance of the evolution of institutions for sustainable agri-environmental resources during the transition process by referring to examples of agri-environmental problem areas in Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs). It is often stated...