Brunei's strategic dilemmas

Abstract

This paper compares health policy trends in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand with the purpose of drawing usable lessons in reform. The study finds that governments in the region are rapidly privatizing the provision of healthcare at the same time as they are expanding the government's role in financing. The paper argues that expansion of public financing at the same time as private provision is misconceived as the combination would aggravate instances and severity of market failures peculiar to the sector. The dysfunctional trend is particularly evident in Indonesia and the Philippines. In Thailand, in contrast, the expansion of public financing has occurred in the context of a health system dominated by public providers, which has had the effect of restraining healthcare costs. Malaysia occupies a mid position between Indonesia and the Philippines on the one hand and Thailand on the other. All four cases underline the value of state capacity in designing optimal policies and implementing them effectively.     

Factor Proportions,Openness and Factor Prices in Kenya 1965–2000

This study analyses how changes in factor abundance and openness have affected relative factor prices in Kenya since 1965, using cointegration analysis and error correction models of relative factor prices. We find that factor proportions determined relative factor prices in the long run, while openness, measured by three different proxies, possibly had a short run effect on relative factor returns. The only deviation from this pattern occurred during the latter half of the 1990s when there was rapid wage growth, mainly due to labour market deregulation.     

Communication with communities: a South African experience

ABSTRACT

In spite of the conventional wisdom stated by various authors that ‘we are living in the information age’ – a communication era characterised by a global expansion in the reach of mass media and electronic information ‘superhighways’ that span the globe – it is clear that there is growing realisation that it is still difficult to reach and communicate with rural communities in South Africa. The main aim of this article is therefore to examine the application of development communication theories in practice when communicating with communities in the Third World. In this article I argue that the viability of and prospects for effective communication with communities depend on three interrelated aspects. Firstly, the viability and prospects depend on current theoretical trends or approaches in development communication, because at the root of development communication – regardless of how this concept is defined – lies the issues of a structured and theoretical approach to community communication which are determined by current trends. Secondly, and crucial to the viability and prospects of community communication, is the question of which development communication methods or media to apply at the various stages of communication to reach the different target audiences. Thirdly, the viability and prospects for successful community communication will be influenced by an integrated approach to the application of development communication methods and media in development communication programmes or strategies.     

Racial Discrimination and Alcohol Problems: Examining Interactions with Genetic Risk and Impulsivity among African American Young Adults

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Experiences of racial discrimination have been shown to increase risk for alcohol problems. Some individuals may be particularly vulnerable to the negative...     

The future of political campaigning: the American example

The Internet will provide a way to force direct democracy to the fore, replacing many of the prerogatives now reserved for representative democracy. This is especially true in Europe where the continental integration of the economy has not been matched by integrated political democracy. Lobbying in the UK will become less relevant as the EU comes to predominate. Lobbying in the future will have to be directed downward — to mobilise the public — rather than upward, attempting to influence the Parliament. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Structuring Legal Institutions

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system.     

Legal Validity Qua Specific Mode of Existence

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices.