Internal Market System Research Articles

From home, to market, to headquarters, to home. Relocating health services planning and purchasing in New Zealand.

Health sector restructuring has been in vogue, but no country has engaged in as much health sector restructuring as New Zealand where, in a decade, there have been four different public health sector structures. This article discusses New Zealand's four structures with an emphasis on relocating the critical functions of health care planning and purchasing, and on the development of the present district health board system. The four structures include: an area health board system (1989-1991) with planning and purchasing located at "home" in local areas and closely aligned with service provision; a competitive internal market system (1993-1996) which separated planning and purchasing from service provision; a centralised system with a "headquarters" controlling planning and purchasing (1997-1999) while maintaining the distance from provision; and the district health board system currently under development (1999-) which sees purchasing and planning sent home again to regions and linked closely with service provision. The present system entails the devolution of considerable responsibility to the local level, within a framework of strong central government control. Based on New Zealand's experience, the article notes that all but the market structure appear to have provided an adequate environment for effective health care planning and purchasing.

Managed health care perspectives: a study of management accounting reforms on managing financial difficulties in a health care organization

This paper examines the effect of two accounting reforms on managing financial difficulties in a health care organization. At the beginning of the 1990s, Kronoberg County Council, a health care organization with more than 7,000 employees, was exposed to a strained financial situation. The County Council Assembly decided on a radical retrenchment policy. To make this policy workable, the management accounting system was subject to two major reforms: responsibility accounting and an internal market system. A longitudinal study was carried out between 1992 and 1997. To understand the development, four different conceptual models have been used in the study: the institutional theorist's perspective, a conceptual framework for the design of organizational control mechanisms, the importance of receptive contexts and the concept of ‘appreciative judgement’. Each of these frameworks contributes a different interpretation of the reforms. The study gives support to Pettigrew's theory on the contextual dependency of strategic change. A disciplining context made it possible to balance income and expenditure. Budget planning and responsibility accounting were powerful tools when this balancing strategy was carried out. The internal market system was not a solution to the problem. In this context, it threatened to aggravate the financial problem.

Sexual trafficking in women: international political economy and the politics of sex.

A recent manifestation of the North/South, East/West political-economic divide is the international sex trade in women, of which trafficking in women for purposes of sexual employment is a large subset. Trafficking in humans in general, and women in particular, has taken center stage in many nation-states as an issue of a threat to national security and societal cohesion. This article explores some of the basic facts about trafficking and spotlights it as a truly global phenomenon, with its contemporary origins in the international capitalist market system. Furthermore, it argues that the international political economy of sex not only includes the supply side--the women of the third world, the poor states, or exotic Asian women--but it cannot maintain itself without the demand from the organizers of the trade--the men from industrialized and developing countries. The patriarchal world system hungers for and sustains the international subculture of docile women from underdeveloped nations.

The Media and Consumer Perception in a Loosely Coupled International Market System: The Case of Mad Cow Disease

The Media and Consumer Perception in a Loosely Coupled International Market System: The Case of Mad Cow Disease

Contracting in the National Health Service (NHS): recognizing the need for co-operation.

Within the reorganized National Health Service hierarchical relationships between Health Authorities and Trusts have been replaced by functional differentiation. However, differentiation of function cannot be seen as an end in itself and management of the relationship between purchasers and providers must include managing the differentiation as well as the function. This paper suggests that collaborative and administrative activities have a distinct role to play in health service management. The paper suggests that in health service management market strategies are likely to dominate in relation to resource allocation activities. The paper also argues that administrative strategies are likely to be necessary within the internal market system--to bridge the gap resulting from the differentiation of function.

National interests and geopolitics: A primer on ‘the basic provisions of the military doctrine of the Russian federation’

Abstract : The emergence of the new multi-ethnic nation-state--the Russian Federation on the geostrategic map-- is one of the most important realities of the contemporary world. Though the Russian Federation was proclaimed as the successor of the Soviet Union as one of the great powers, in the matter of international economic and political obligations it is not the same country. Moreover, as a result of the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the former Soviet Union, Russia faces new realities and evolutionary changes in international and domestic arenas that inevitably shape and will continue to shape its domestic and foreign policy. Three themes influence the changes. Foremost is the reduced military threat; one that was primarily based on the ideological rivalry between socialist and capitalist systems during the Cold War. Second, it is critical for Russia to join the international market system and democratic environment. Such participation will be the main guarantee of the future of the democracy and market economy in the country and political stability in the region. Lastly, there is a deep economic, political cultural crisis inside the country because of the rapid dissolution of the ineffective state institutions of the former Soviet Union and the necessity to formulate and pursue national goals on the basis of compromise between the interests of different social groups

Pricing of track time in railroad operations: An internal market approach

This paper presents a computable equilibrium model of an internal market for track resources in a railroad. The problem of estimating the value to each train of track capacity, which in turn is used to create the actual train schedules, is formulated as an N-player, noncooperative game with nondisjoint strategy sets. In this model, the effects of other traffic on a given train schedule (the mean and variance of total travel time) are represented by a line delay model for a scheduled railroad on a partially double track rail line. The generalized Nash equilibrium for the resulting game-theoretic model is found as a solution to a quasi-variational inequality problem. The goal of this model is to ascertain how close the prices from the internal market system (the game-theoretic model) comes to globally optimal prices. Data from a major Class I railroad are used to explore this issue in detail.

The NHS has its limitations.

Virginia Bottomley's announcement about the closure of some London hospitals illustrates the effect of the internal market system in the NHS.

Provision ground and plantation labour in four windward islands: Competition for resources during slavery

The role of the provision ground and internal marketing system in the context of plantation slavery has been a subject of increased interest during the last generation. A description and analysis of the provision-ground system in the four Windward Islands of Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and Tobago during the last 50 years of slavery offer insight into these large subjects. Three tentative conclusions are reached: first, echoing Mintz, that the provision-ground and internal marketing system provided an extensive stage, as in Jamaica, for slaves participation in independent activities; second, that the slaves attempts to exploit the potential of these activities inevitably created intense competition between themselves and plantation owners and managers for labour services and land resources; third, that slaves success in creating and defending corners of independent existence fostered the growth of attitudes to plantation labour and to independent activities which affected labour relations in the post-slavery period.

Globalization and the Politics of Locality: Orange County, California, in the Cold War Era

F or the past several decades, the American economy has been experiencing both internal restructuring and globalization. That is to say, the economy has been transformed domestically away from its manufacturing base toward the service and information sectors, while being integrated into an international market system. In this expanding global economy, capital and technology have become increasingly mobile, sharply limiting the ability of local governments to control the use of space.' This article seeks to explain the political impact of such profound economic and technological transformations on relatively affluent and privileged regions whose economies are globally integrated. In such regions, the old realities of local place and local tradition have been supplanted by the new realities of footloose capital and information technology. Tensions and conflicts have emerged between proponents of the new global system and those forces seeking to preserve and protect locality. Indeed, the idea of locality has assumed a heightened political importance in contemporary America. What are these new global forces, and in what ways has insurgency against them been expressed? After some general observations, this

The Economic Emancipation of the Non-Slaveholding Class: Upcountry Farmers in the Georgia Cotton Economy

The transformation of the Cotton South after the Civil War involved distinct regional developments. Regional analysis of crop production in Reconstruction Georgia, for example, identifies different patterns of specialization in cotton in the Cotton Belt and Upcountry counties. It also reveals an overlooked aspect of Reconstruction, the integration of Upcountry farmers into the cotton economy. The spread of cotton culture into the Upcountry followed the construction of an internal marketing and transportation system in Georgia in the 1870s which was related to and was part of the formation of a national market in the postbellum United States.

Marketing without and with marketing boards: the origins of state marketing boards in Nigeria

Since their inception, Nigerian marketing boards have been used to serve various interests and purposes, hardly any of which have benefited the producers. They originated in the Second World War and were perpetuated after the war by a Labour government so that they might play their part in ‘meeting British needs’, to cite the title of a forthcoming study by Mike Cowen and Bob Shenton. Nigerian politicians found them a ready‐made instrument for taxing farmers, enriching themselves and financing their political activities. Their pricing policies discouraged farmers from producing export crops, thus rendering the boards redundant though not, regrettably, ensuring their abolition. Nigeria is fortunate in that, until recently, marketing boards have not bought food for sale in domestic markets and have no monopoly, in form or in fact, over the purchase of crops, other than cotton, for sale within Nigeria. Discussion of the Nigerian marketing boards has tended, rightly, to focus on their monopoly of the legal export of certain crops, on their pricing policies and on the use to which governments put the funds which they derived from the trading profits of the boards. Less remarked on, the boards also structured the internal marketing system for the commodites they export. Indeed, when the commodity marketing boards were established in 1947 the main justification given was the need to change the internal marketing system for export crops, ostensibly in the interests of protecting the producer from the ills of middlemen in an unregulated market. These arguments for state intervention in, and regulation of, produce marketing, in Nigeria as elsewhere in Africa, have found sympathy among socialists who have been all too willing to take statism as at least offering a foundation for socialism. This article examines the provenance of the marketing boards and of the arguments which justified their inception during the crisis of the colonial economy in the 1930s.

Men, Women, and Trade

This paper considers one aspect of the relationship between social organization and certain sorts of economic activity, using a particular setting, the internal market system in peasant societies (Mintz, 1959), as a frame of reference. The argument proceeds from the well-known fact that, in many of these market systems, much or even most of the distributive activity is carried on by women, and these women often engage in commerce more or less independently of the economic undertakings of their husbands. In such cases, husband and wife participate in distinguishably different risk structures, an arrangement having particular relevance to the nature of family life and culturally determined sex-role differentiation. Furthermore, since husbands and wives in such cases may carry on not only independent but also different economic pursuits, it would not be surprising if some of the attitudes related to the kind of economic activity also differed along sexual lines. Productive and distributive undertakings require different skills; probably they evoke different temperamental responses as well. One might claim that the tests of success for the middleman are different in character from the tests of success for the agricultural producer; those successful in one pursuit are not necessarily those most likely to succeed in the other. Of course this contention does not preclude some optimum combination of skills; many producers alsoengage successfully in intermediary and distributive activities, and some of the so-called underdeveloped world's most skilled traders began as agricultural producers (Bauer, 1957: 71; Bauer and Yamey, 1957: 104–5).

Market Place and Marketing System: Toward a Theory of Peasant Economic Integration

Students of peasant society recognize the importance of the market economy for understanding decision-making processes within the house- hold and the nature of articulation between the peasant sector and the national society. We intend to describe market behavior in Northeast Brazil and to relate such behavior to changes in the agricultural economy in general. The ultimate goal is to understand how peasants are integrated into the national economy as commodity producers and consumers of manufactured goods. By concentrating on the internal marketing system for food staples in Northeast Brazil we hope to refine earlier views of peasants and to suggest a definition of peasantry based on economic integration rather than on partial participation in the national culture.