Sub-Optimality in NHS Sourcing in the UK: Demand-Side Constraints on Supply-Side Improvement

The UK NHS and its Purchasing and Supply Agency (PASA) are implementing reforms for the procurement of goods and services. One aspect of the new approach creates regional confederations in order to overcome the current inability to enforce 'National Framework Agreements' within individual NHS Trusts. This is a sensible approach to resolving a lack of effective consolidation of demand within the NHS at the Trust level, but recent research into the procurement practices of regionally based NHS Trusts has highlighted a number of internal demand problems that this new approach is unlikely to overcome. These include the failure by the Trusts individually, and by the NHS centrally, to control and manage the NHS design and specification process effectively and, in many cases, an inability to measure or collect information on the clinical and cost effectiveness of medical interventions. It is argued, therefore, that while the new reforms may be an improvement on the past, it is likely that the confederations are destined to fail. This is largely the result of the NHS – centrally, regionally and locally – lacking an understanding of how to align demand and supply effectively so as to provide the levers to manage the procurement of goods and services proactively.     

Awkward Class or Awkward Classes? Class relations in the Russian peasantry before collectivisation

This article develops some criticisms of Teodor Shanin's thesis concerning the class structure of the Russian peasantry up to the end of the 1920s. Rival Marxist approaches are then discussed, especially that of L. N. Kritsman and his school who saw the relations of production of the Russian peasantry as characterised by exploitative class relations between households and thus called into question all approaches asserting the social homogeneity of the peasantry as a class.     

In search of international political economy a review essay

John Edelman Spero, The Politics of International Economic Relations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977).

Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest. Raw Materials, Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

Charles‐Albert Michalet, Le capitalisme mondial (Paris: Presses universi‐taires de France, 1976).     

Delfi AS v Estonia: The Liability of Secondary Internet Publishers for Violation of Reputational Rights under the European Convention on Human Rights

In October 2013, the European Court of Human Rights in Delfi AS v Estonia upheld a decision of the Estonian Supreme Court to impose liability on the owners of an internet news portal for defamatory comments which had been posted on their website by anonymous third parties. This note suggests that the decision is important in the context of publications with a ‘public interest’ element to them, because it appears to afford more protection to the right to reputation (deriving from the Article 8 right to privacy) and less to freedom of expression than was formerly the case. It is further argued that the Court's emphasis on the positive obligation of states to protect this right to reputation may mean that the existing English law in this area, including, potentially section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013, is inconsistent with the ECHR jurisprudence.