Regulating Providers' Reimbursement in a Mixed Market for Health Care

Hospitals can be reimbursed for their costs in many ways. Several authors have investigated the effects of these reimbursement rules on physician incentives and, therefore, on the quantity of services provided to patients. A form of (linear) cost-sharing tends to emerge as the socially efficient reimbursement policy. We present a model of hospital reimbursement, based on Ellis and McGuire (1986). The new feature is that physicians can supply private health care services to a patient, as well as public sector ones; a common institutional arrangement in many health care systems. We investigate the optimal public sector reimbursement rule given that private market incentives must now be taken into account. Public sector cost-sharing remains socially efficient, but it is generally non-linear: the precise details depend on whether public and private services are substitutes or complements and on the degree of social efficiency achieved in the private sector. Other reimbursement schemes exhibit optimality properties not present in Ellis and McGuire's work.     

Ecomuseums as cross-sector partnerships: governance,strategy and leadership

Ecomuseums are attracting increasing attention as means of preserving heritage and also impacting positively on social and economic issues. This paper contrasts ecomuseums with previous forms of cross-sector partnerships. The authors focus on the governance, strategy and leadership of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum. The findings have lessons for ecomuseums and other cross-sector partnerships both in and outside the UK.     

Measuring growth: Is the new US approach better?

In this article, Alistair Barr looks at the new approach adopted by the United States to measure growth. He argues that chain-weighting is not to blame for the downward revision to estimates of growth during the current recovery. However, it has highlighted the sensitivity of estimates of real growth to different methodologies and this has implications for cross-country comparisons.     

Economics and Biological Evolution

The employment of insecticides raises the relative fitness of resistant insects; the use of antibiotics applies selection pressure in favour of resistant strains of bacteria; lower limits on fish net mesh size raises the advantages of smaller adults. These are some of the many examples of the unintended impact of human activity upon biological evolution. Often this evolution has economic significance, as it does in the examples quoted. This paper examines some of the principles involved and provides a preliminary analysis of the extent to which the economically optimal inducement of evolution differs from that arising when changes in selection pressures are not anticipated. Thanks are due to Jenny Ligthart and other participants at the 1994 EAERE conference in Dublin and especially to two referees of this journal for their helpful comments.     

Evaluating the impact of a communication exercise in an industrial works

In this article Alistair Ostell and his colleagues discuss a study which evaluated the impact of communicating business information to a large industrial workforce. The results indicated that the exercise was successful in terms of informing employees but it apparently failed to motivate them to act or think differently.     

Biodiversity and Optimal Policies Towards R&D and the Growth of Genetically Modified Crops

In this paper we provide a simple model illustrating the possible nature ofgovernment policy with regards to genetic modification, taking into accountits impact on the environment. We show that it is necessary not only tointervene in the growing of crops, but also to intervene in R&D througha tax on the adoption of new GM technology. Without intervention at bothlevels, both the cultivation of GM crops and the rate of innovation in GM willexceed their socially optimal levels.     

The Economic Analysis of Industrial Accidents: a re-assessment

Conventional economic approaches to the analysis of industrial accidents utilise the hedonic pricing approach. This approach usually excludes potentially important institutional, sociological and macroeconomic determinants of occupational safety. Initially we identify some of the theoretical and empirical problems with orthodox economic analysis in this area. An alternative model is then formulated which explicitly encompasses a broader range of determinants. Finally, the model is tested using UK industry accident data, the results being inconsistent with the compensating differentials' emphasis of orthodox analysis but supportive of the augmented model.