Policy Ought Research Articles

Rule by Good People: Health Governance and the Violence of Moral Authority in Thailand

This article rethinks the presumed translatability of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) health promotion models and explores the unintended consequences of their global export. Specifically, I focus on the Thai military government’s adoption (2006–2008) of the Health in All Policies (HiAP) initiative, which redefined health outcomes as the standard universal measure against which the success of national public policy ought to be evaluated. Through my fieldwork at state-owned Thai health organizations, I track how a dharmic concept of wisdom (panya), one that links the capacity to make healthy choices with differential levels of enlightenment, undergirds the Thai adoption of HiAP, with political implications that are unrepresentable in nondharmic political worlds. I analyze the ramifications of framing a political intervention within the apolitical bioscientific register of medical necessity, and explore the effect that global health movements have on the status of political legitimacy and national political conflicts.

Berkshire'ssDisintermediation: Buffett's New Managerial Modell

Berkshire Hathaway, among history’s largest and most successful corporations, shuns middlemen; its chairman, the legendary investor Warren Buffett, excoriates financial intermediaries. The acquisitive conglomerate rarely borrows money, retains brokers, or hires consultants. Its governance is lean, using an advisory board and bucking all forms of corporate bureaucracy. Berkshire’s shareholders also minimize the roles of intermediaries like stockbrokers and stock exchanges by trading little and holding for lengthy periods.By exploring Berkshire’s antipathy to intermediation, this article supports the view that public policy ought to make considerable room for companies to define their own internal business practices and that more companies ought to consider emulating aspects of Berkshire’s disintermediation. While Buffett’s legacy to date has been to lead two generations of value investors, Berkshire’s radically ingenious disintermediation has the potential to shape the next two generations of value managers, as argued in this paper and at greater length in the author’s recent book, Berkshire Beyond Buffett: The Enduring Value of Values.

Long-run Effect of the Global Financial Crisis on Singapore's Tourism and the Economy

This study employs recent Singaporean tourism survey data, the updated Singaporean input–output tables and a computable general equilibrium model to gauge the long-run effects of the 2008 global financial crisis and selected policy responses. The simulation results suggest that the global financial crisis has had mild negative long-run effects on the overall development of Singapore's economy, and that the GST deduction policy ought to offset this negative effect.

Częściowe zawieszenie wykonania kary pozbawienia wolności. Uwagi i propozycje na tle analizy porównawczej stanu przestępczości i obecnej reformy prawa karnego w Polsce i we Francji

Częściowe zawieszenie wykonania kary pozbawienia wolności. Uwagi i propozycje na tle analizy porównawczej stanu przestępczości i obecnej reformy prawa karnego w Polsce i we Francji

Explaining the economic ‘irrationality’ of farmers' land use behaviour: The role of productivist attitudes and non-pecuniary benefits

Although the physical conditions of a farm and farming system will to some extent predispose a farmer towards converting land to alternative agricultural uses such as forestry, results presented in this paper suggest that differences in underlying farming motivations can also play an important role in explaining farmers' decision-making. Our findings suggest that even in the face of higher economic returns, some farmers may be reluctant to convert land to forestry as to do so would not be in keeping with their productivist attitudes. Other farmers may fear losing the non-pecuniary benefits derived from ‘working the land’. We conclude that economic incentives alone are unlikely to encourage certain cohorts of farmers to consider alternative land uses such as farm forestry and that policy ought to be guided by a better understanding of the differing farming motivations of farm operators.

On Health Policy and Management (HPAM): mind the theory-policy-practice gap.

We argue that the field of Health Policy and Management (HPAM) ought to confront the gap between theory, policy, and practice. Although there are perennial efforts to reform healthcare systems, the conceptual barriers are considerable and reflect the theory-policy-practice gap. We highlight four dimensions of the gap: 1) the dominance of microeconomic thinking in health policy analysis and design; 2) the lack of learning from management theory and comparative case studies; 3) the separation of HPAM from the rank and file of healthcare; and 4) the failure to expose medical students to issues of HPAM. We conclude with suggestions for rethinking the field of HPAM by embracing broader perspectives, e.g. ethics, urban health, systems analysis and cross-national analyses of healthcare systems.

Hedge funds

Purpose – The paper's aim is to explore the impact of statistical arbitrage and high-frequency trading as hedge fund investment strategies that have a significant impact on the environment of corporations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a meta-analysis of the role of investment strategies within complex systems. Findings – The growth of hedge fund investment activity based on statistical arbitrage tends to produce a vulnerability; more funds using the strategy helps to create the profitable outcomes that the strategy relies upon. However, the growth also reduces the time lines of profitability and produces an underlying instability based on overlapping holdings and the use of leverage. The shortened timelines also create a further impetus towards technological competition and promotes high frequency trading, which then introduces further vulnerabilities based on “stop-loss cascades”. Research limitations/implications – Much of the trading creates a superficial form of liquidity, which gives a limited sense of market vulnerabilities. The basis of complex interactions between high frequency traders is also not clearly understood. Researchers and agents of policy ought to pay greater attention to the issues than is currently the case. Originality/value – The area is one that is under-researched.

Some Thoughts on Hamill, the Two Kingdoms, and the Ethics and Logic of Higher Tax Rates and Redistribution

According to Susan Hamill, Judeo-Christian ethics call on us to raise marginal tax rates. Hamill bases this on the belief that higher taxes will yield more income redistribution to the poor and make them better off. Whether or not tax policy ought to be based on religious criteria is beyond the scope of this article. What the article argues instead is that Hamill has an imperfect understanding of both ethical reasoning and of the relationship between taxes and the welfare of the poor. The problems with her ethical reasoning start out with the canard that higher taxes represent simple self-sacrifice. This fallacy allows her to blithely disregard any ethical problems associated with the coercive nature of taxes. Hamill goes on to argue that there is no conflict between her call for higher taxation in the name of Christianity and Boyd’s call for Christians to focus on their own actions rather than on amassing power to coerce others. After considering Hamills ethical reasoning, this article points out that there is no clear positive relationship between higher tax rates and the welfare of the poor in the first place. For one thing, the actual allocation of government expenditures is influenced by a number of stakeholders and is not directly tied to current tax revenues. More importantly, higher tax rates are associated with a variety of disincentives for work and production. This may in turn slow down economic growth and thus reduce the future well-being of everyone, including the poor.

On the Electoral Relevance of Education Policy in the German Länder

Education policy in Germany experienced a boom throughout the 2000s. Numerous reforms were implemented, quite far-reaching shifts of party programmes occurred, and the scope of institutions with an educational mandate widened considerably. At the same time, Landtag elections came to be seen as less dominated by federal politics. Yet we still know little about education policy's electoral relevance. The present article, following a most-likely design, analyses those five Landtag elections that were held since the reform of federalism in 2006 for which the importance of education policy ought to have been highest. It turns out that even though education is one of the very few policies which the Länder can decide upon autonomously, and despite the recent upsurge of regional factors in determining the outcomes of such second-order elections, nearly all Landtag elections are won or lost on other battlefields.

Non-government distance education funding: the need for equity in Australian schooling

This reflection outlines the problems associated with the Australian Government’s recurrent funding policy for non-government distance education. It demonstrates the policy’s inconsistencies with stated government educational policy and with commonly held expectations of fairness in a democratic society. A comparison of the current funding of non-government distance education to various long-standing educational delivery modes demonstrates that non-government distance education is yet to be appropriately funded by the Commonwealth. The discussion concludes by indicating that this emerging pedagogy is distinct from traditional schooling, that its students ought to be given the same educational opportunities as other Australian school students, and that the current policy ought to be redressed expeditiously.

The Ethics of Geoengineering: Moral Considerability and the Convergence Hypothesis

abstractAlthough it could avoid some harmful effects of climate change, sulphate aerosol geoengineering (SAG), or injecting sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere in order to reflect incoming solar radiation, threatens substantial harm to humans and non‐humans. I argue that SAG is prima facie ethically problematic from anthropocentric, animal liberationist, and biocentric perspectives. This might be taken to suggest that ethical evaluations of SAG can rely on Bryan Norton's convergence hypothesis, which predicts that anthropocentrists and non‐anthropocentrists will agree to implement the same or similar environmental policies. However, there are potential scenarios in which anthropocentrists and non‐anthropocentrists would seem to diverge on whether a particular SAG policy ought to be implemented. This suggests that the convergence hypothesis should not be relied on in ethical evaluation of SAG. Instead, ethicists should consider the merits and deficiencies of both non‐anthropocentric perspectives and the ethical evaluations of SAG such perspectives afford.

Entrepreneurship, Stages of Development, and Industrialization

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of stateowned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be a nuanced partnership between entrepreneurs and the state. In this paper we outline some considerations for such an industrial policy where the entrepreneur–state nexus is paramount. Moreover, we argue that such an industrial policy will need to take into consideration that the entrepreneur–state nexus is evolving, and that it depends on the stage of development of a particular country.

Gentrification as policy – empirical frontiers

This paper essentially argues that contemporary gentrification ought to be conceived of as a prevailing, though place-specific policy strategy. What is at stake is to move beyond common but limited representations of gentrification as a mere process of neighbourhood change through which urban space is dedicated to progressively more affluent users, and to specifically acknowledge the role of state actors in fostering this socio-spatial transformation. The paper mainly builds on findings brought out by selected – and still quite rare – works seeking to empirically document and make sense of the emergence or consolidation of a pro-gentrification coherence across changes in diverse policy fields (e.g. housing, tourism, culture, infrastructures, etc.). Findings brought out of analyses conducted in Paris, Roubaix and Antwerp are particularly scrutinized. They transversally suggest that following a pro-gentrification policy agenda practically means combining actions on demand and supply of gentrifying spaces together with the production of legitimating representations ; moreover, they stress that the arrangement of a pro-gentrification policy agenda is a social construct built on strategic (re-)organisation of urban governance structures. These findings suggest that reinforcing the empirical bases of the multifaceted and place-specific ties between gentrification and urban policy ought to be considered as a priority task for researchers seeking to make sense of contemporary urban change, while sustaining the critical essence of the gentrification concept and further developing its capacity to mobilise around issues of social justice and class domination in cities.

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood: How might evolutionary theory inform policy?

Teenage pregnancy and motherhood are considered to be pressing social concerns and, in the majority of developed countries, are often viewed as problems in need of solutions. While a number of factors are associated with teenage motherhood, the underlying causes remain elusive. Despite a lack of consensus, policy aimed at ‘solving’ teenage motherhood is typically based on these proposed proximate correlates; addressing these, rather than the cause. Recent appraisals of this approach suggest that it may not be working effectively, if at all, and policy makers might be in need of some novel approaches. This paper discusses how policy decisions concerning reproductive timing may benefit from the perspective provided by evolutionary life-history theory, and why policy ought to take into account the hypothesis that teenage motherhood is the outcome of an adaptive response of an evolved reproductive strategy to conditions of risk and uncertainty; that having children at an earlier age may promote lineage survival when personal future is uncertain.

The Determinants Of European Bank Profitability

The rate of return earned by a financial institution is affected by numerous factors. These factors include elements internal to each financial institution and several important external forces shaping earnings performance. The type of explanation would determine possible policy implications and ought to be taken seriously. This paper reviews the literature on bank performance studies and classifies the bank profitability determinants. The second part of the paper quantifies how internal determinants (within effects changes) and external factors (dynamic reallocation effects) contribute to the performance of the EU banking industry as a whole in 1994-1998. We construct OLS and fixed effects models, and the results provide a new perspective for understanding the impact of changes in competition on the performance of the EU banking industry. The estimation results suggest that the profitability of European banks is influenced not only by factors related to their management decisions but also to changes in the external macroeconomic environment. The results are in contrast to studies that have examined the structure-performance relationship for European banking and find a positive effect of the concentration and/or market share variables on bank profitability.

A human development and capabilities ‘prospective analysis’ of global higher education policy

In global times, university education policy that holds the greatest promise for social responsibility is the focus here; the argument made is that such policy ought to be conceptualised using a normative human development and capabilities approach, drawing on the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Their ideas offer a values‐based way of seeing higher education policy and development. Reasons are advanced for the necessary contribution of universities to the public good and to poverty reduction, while the contested purposes of universities are further outlined before human development and capabilities are presented for consideration as a superior approach to that of dominant reductionist human capital policies. The political dimension of policy development is acknowledged and explored to show that different normative frameworks generate different policies. The ideas are operationalised in relation to pedagogical arrangements and in the indexing of policy aims informed by human development, against pedagogies and graduate capabilities.

The Child Trust Fund in the UK: How might opening rates by parents be increased?

The UK has recently seen the introduction of the Child Trust Fund (CTF). All babies born from September 2002 receive either a £250 or £500 endowment from government, with children from low-income families qualifying for the higher endowment. Parents are crucial for this policy. They are supposed to open an account for their child and will make key decisions about saving and investment. However, important issues confront parents. Around a quarter of parents leave CTF accounts unopened. I examine how opening rates might be increased, drawing in particular on recent work in behavioral economics. I suggest that policy ought to focus on reforms combining behavioral economics with steps to improve financial capability.

Is Sustainability Sustainable?

Themost important concept in current environmental thinking is sustainability. Environmental policies, economic policies, development, resource use—all of these things, according to the consensus, ought to be sustainable. But what is sustainability? What is its ethical foundation? There is little consensus about how these questions ought to be answered. Many environmentalists are troubled by the plethora of understandings of sustainability in the literature. Andrew Dobson, for example, counts more than three hundred definitions! Others see this as a virtue, equating sustainability with other contested concepts such as happiness, justice, and rights. Either way, exploring the ethical significance of sustainability is a vital task. Surprisingly, almost nothing has been done to justify sustainability as an ethical constraint. My aim is to investigate whether that can be done. I shall argue that the chief conceptions of sustainability in the environmental literature are not themselves sustainable. They often have innocuous interpretations that are plausible but do little to advance the environmentalists’ or any other particular agenda. Their more radical interpretations, however, lack ethical foundations; they face obvious counterexamples when applied to individual lives and communities. There is no reason to take any of them as criteria that any environmental, economic, developmental, or resource management policy must meet, or even as goals toward which any such policy ought to strive. Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:84–101 DOI 10.1007/s12129-009-9152-4

Reframing the multilevel triple helix in a regional innovation system: a case of systemic foresight and regimes in renewal of Skåne's food industry

Most findings on the triple helix system derive from studies based on high-tech sectors, and seldom so on traditional industries. A foresight exercise aimed at renewal of the mature food industry in the Skåne region in southern Sweden was conducted in 2006–2007. The findings suggest that a multilevel triple helix policy ought to be used in a systemic way from a bottom up perspective, including companies as well as other triple helix actors throughout the value chain. Further, the findings underscore the importance of the role intermediaries play enhancing the integrative abilities of actors in the regional food system. Cultural analysis is used to elicit a deeper understanding of the different regimes that influence the actors. This is consistent with the observation highlighted in this article that the actors in the food system bear values arising from a time when the Swedish food system catered for national self-sufficiency under a regime of limited market competition.

Problemy poprawy struktury gospodarstw rolnych w Polsce

In Polish agriculture progress in the improvement of the structure of farms in accordance with economic quantity is insufficient in relation to the challenge of intensifying competition on the common agricultural market of the European Union and on the world agricultural market. In the conditions of globalisation and integration only modern and economically strong farms can ensure themselves a stable position in the emerging division of labour within EU 27. In the conditions prevailing in Poland the principal factor of improvement in the structure of farms in accordance with economic quantity is a radical change in the acreage structure of farms and mainly an increase in the proportion of farms having 30 ha and over 30 ha of arable land. However, progress in this respect, especially in recent years, has been very slow. The main barrier to faster progress is the lack of supply of arable land coming from farms liquidating or reducing their agricultural production. In this situation the popularisation and consolidation of the institution of lease ought to become an important factor of improvement in the agrarian structure of Polish agriculture. Therefore, the agricultural policy ought to facilitate the operation of farms using land under lease agreements and to strengthen the lessees' conviction about the lasting character of their work on the leased land.