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Increasing global water shortage is enhancing the need for water management policies, such as water demand policies. This study presents the main water demand-side management policies implemented in Israel, designed to reduce wate...
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Increasing global water shortage is enhancing the need for water management policies, such as water demand policies. This study presents the main water demand-side management policies implemented in Israel, designed to reduce water demand in the urban sector, and subsequently examines their effectiveness by an econometric model, based on residential water consumption data. The main findings indicate that, among the economic policy tools, a smooth increase of water tariffs was not effective, while a drought surcharge led to a significant reduction in residential water demand. Educational policy tools also significantly reduced water demand, though the daily report on the Kinneret water level (a long-term educational tool) had a larger effect on residential water consumption than awareness campaigns (a short-term educational tool). These results may assist policymakers to make informed decisions regarding the implementation of such policy tools.
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Healthcare reforms often result in disappointing failures due to the misguided goals they pursue and the flawed means they employ. The paper proposes that effectiveness-defined as universal access to essential healthcare at a cost...
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Healthcare reforms often result in disappointing failures due to the misguided goals they pursue and the flawed means they employ. The paper proposes that effectiveness-defined as universal access to essential healthcare at a cost affordable to society-is a worthwhile and achievable objective. But to realize effectiveness, reformers need to discard their a priori preferences for markets or governments and instead select a range of policy tools targeting different problems. The paper will argue that a concerted use of regulatory, fiscal, informational and organizational tools shaping the behaviour of healthcare providers, insurers and users can achieve effective healthcare. The paper will highlight the use and misuse as well as non-use of these tools in China to shed light on tools ' approach to health policy reforms. Lessons from China are highly relevant to developing countries around the world trying to reform their health sector. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Policy goals and means exist at different levels of abstraction and application and policies can be seen to be comprised of a number of components or elements, not all of which are as amenable to (re)design as others. Defining and...
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Policy goals and means exist at different levels of abstraction and application and policies can be seen to be comprised of a number of components or elements, not all of which are as amenable to (re)design as others. Defining and thinking about polices and policy-making in this way is very useful because it highlights how policy design is all about the effort to match goals and instruments both within and across categories. That is, successful policy design requires (1) that policy aims, objectives, and targets be coherent; (2) that implementation preferences, policy tools and tool calibrations should also be consistent; and (3) that policy aims and implementation preferences; policy objectives, and policy tools; and policy targets and tool calibrations, should also be congruent and convergent. Policy instrument choices can thus be seen to result from a nested or embedded relationship within a larger framework of established governance modes and policy regime logics. In this contextual model, the range of choices left at the level of concrete targeted policy instrument calibrations-the typical subject of policy tool analysis-is restricted by the kinds of decisions made about policy objectives and the appropriate tools to attain them, and both of these, in turn, by the kind of choices made at the highest level setting out general policy aims and implementation preferences.
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Policy design as a field of inquiry in policy studies has had a chequered history. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the field languished in the 1990s and 2000s as work in the policy sciences focused on the impac...
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Policy design as a field of inquiry in policy studies has had a chequered history. After a promising beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, the field languished in the 1990s and 2000s as work in the policy sciences focused on the impact on policy outcomes of meta-changes in society and the international environment. Both globalization and governance studies of the period ignored traditional design concerns in arguing that changes at this level predetermined policy specifications and promoted the use of market and collaborative governance (network) instruments. However, more recent work re-asserting the role of governments both at the international and domestic levels has revitalized design studies. This special issue focuses on recent efforts in the policy sciences to reinvent, or more properly, 're-discover' the policy design orientation in light of these developments. Articles in the issue address leading edge issues such as the nature of design thinking and expertise in a policy context, the temporal aspects of policy designs, the role of experimental designs, the question of policy mixes, the issue of design flexibility and resilience and the criteria for assessing superior designs. Evidence and case studies deal with design contexts and processes in Canada, China, Singapore, the UK, EU, Australia and elsewhere. Such detailed case studies are necessary for policy design studies to advance beyond some of the strictures placed in their way by the reification of, and over-emphasis upon, only a few of the many possible kinds of policy designs identified by the 1990s and early 2000s literature.
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Policies increasingly come in complex packages and understanding the nature of design criteria for such portfolios is increasingly important. However, existing studies of policy mixes fail to carefully define the dependent variabl...
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Policies increasingly come in complex packages and understanding the nature of design criteria for such portfolios is increasingly important. However, existing studies of policy mixes fail to carefully define the dependent variable of the inquiry. As a result, theorization of policy design has lagged, the cumulative impact of empirical studies has not been great and understanding of the phenomena, despite many observations of its significance in policy studies, has not improved significantly over the past three decades. This paper aims to revitalize this important aspect of policy design work and policy studies by distinguishing between mix types and their impact on policy formulation. It defines key types and subtypes of mixes based on the complexity of design variables such as the number of goals, the number of policies and the number of levels of government and sectors involved in the design of a policy bundle. The taxonomy is then used to assess the validity and applicability of oft-cited but under-examined portfolio design principles and precepts.
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The magnitude and implicatiosn for the cosntruciton industry of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that will ultimately be requried globally and in industrialized countries are critically examined. As a result of the problem o...
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The magnitude and implicatiosn for the cosntruciton industry of reductions in carbon dioxide emissions that will ultimately be requried globally and in industrialized countries are critically examined. As a result of the problem of climate change, these reductions are found to be in the region of 80/90/100 by 2050 - much larger than those presently udner discussion in national and global political fora. The technological feasibility of buildings with low energy requriements and lwo carbon emissions suggests that exisitng technology is capable of delivering reductions in this range.
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Conversion-redirection of existing tools to new goals-is one strategy of gradual transformative change. This strategy is appealing because it does not require actors to introduce new programs or tools. Despite this appeal, it is n...
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Conversion-redirection of existing tools to new goals-is one strategy of gradual transformative change. This strategy is appealing because it does not require actors to introduce new programs or tools. Despite this appeal, it is not as broadly used as other gradual change strategies. This paper argues that this is because there is an additional condition for conversion. To convert an instrument, agents of change should see the connection between the tool and its original goal as loose. That takes place when actors perceive the tool as generic or when they are part of instrument constituencies and not advocacy coalition. The paper demonstrates this argument using an analysis of a positive and a negative case of conversion from immigrant integration policy in Israel. As such, the paper expands our understanding of conversion, going beyond institutional and political factors.
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This paper assesses the individual effects on economic performance of different monetary policy interest rates for a central bank. To measure these effects, we employ an extension of existing Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive...
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This paper assesses the individual effects on economic performance of different monetary policy interest rates for a central bank. To measure these effects, we employ an extension of existing Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregressive (FAVAR) models, such that the number of monetary policy variables can be captured with a few unobservable factors, as well as economic state variables with other unobservable factors. The empirical evidence from Turkey suggests that the four interest rates we consider as policy tools for the central bank affect economic state variables in different magnitudes. Thus, selecting different policy tools provides an environment that allows determining the effects of each tool for differentiated economic outcomes.
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Effectiveness has been understood at three levels of analysis in the scholarly study of policy design. The first is at the systemic level indicating what entails effective formulation environments or spaces making them conducive t...
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Effectiveness has been understood at three levels of analysis in the scholarly study of policy design. The first is at the systemic level indicating what entails effective formulation environments or spaces making them conducive to successful design. The second reflects more program level concerns, surrounding how policy tool portfolios or mixes can be effectively constructed to address complex policy objectives. The third is a more specific instrument level, focusing on what accounts for and constitutes the effectiveness of particular types of policy tools. Undergirding these three levels of analysis are comparative research concerns that concentrate on the capacities of government and political actors to devise and implement effective designs. This paper presents a systematic review of a largely scattered yet quickly burgeoning body of knowledge in the policy sciences, which broadly asks what capacities engender effectiveness at the multiple levels of policy design? The findings bring to light lessons about design effectiveness at the level of formulation spaces, policy mixes and policy programs. Further, this review points to a future research agenda for design studies that is sensitive to the relative orders of policy capacity, temporality and complementarities between the various dimensions of policy capacity.
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This paper investigates the evolution of China's technology standardization policy system in the period from 1978 to 2021. The standardization policy system comprising the supply, demand, and environment policy tool types has evol...
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This paper investigates the evolution of China's technology standardization policy system in the period from 1978 to 2021. The standardization policy system comprising the supply, demand, and environment policy tool types has evolved during standardization development process, which includes three sequential stages: 1) the following-up stage, 2) the catch-up stage, and 3) the upgrading stage. In responding to changes in institutional, economic and technological contexts, the policy orientation has transformed from supporting the government-controlled adoption and standardization of foreign technologies in the following-up stage of standardization development process to developing indigenous standards owning independent intellectual property rights (IPRs) through the government-led standardization system in the catch-up stage, and to international standardization adopting both government-led and market mechanisms in the upgrading stage. In this process, the Chinese Government continued to offer policy support to but tended to relax its control over standardization. Of the three policy tool types, the supply type have remained the dominant ones; the weight of the environment-type of tools tended to decrease, and that of the demand-type of tools tended to increase. Further, the government rationalized the mix of each type of policy tools as the standardization contexts changed. From the Chinese experience, theoretical prescriptions for how standardization policy systems evolve in latecomers are developed. Practical implications for latecomer countries to transform standardization policy system and design their standardization policies are discussed.
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