A relatively new frontier for legal and policy analysis, technical barriers to trade (TBT’s) have become more common as traditional border barriers have been reduced. This comprehensive Handbook comprises original essays by eminent trade scholars exploring the implications of the...

The Australian federal government recently introduced into Parliament legislation mandating the plain packaging of all tobacco products. Tobacco companies and others have raised various legal concerns with this tobacco control scheme, both at a domestic level in relation to constitutional and...

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 after almost 15 years of negotiations, making extensive commitments to open its markets to foreign investment and liberalize trade in goods and services. China represents a huge potential market for foreign telecommunications service...

Health sector decentralization has been widely adopted to improve delivery of health services. While many argue that institutional capacities and mechanisms of accountability required to transform decentralized decision-making into improvements in local health systems are lacking, few empirical...

A dominant perspective in social capital research emphasizes a "structural" dimension of social capital, consisting of network connections, and a "cognitive" dimension, consisting of attitudes toward trust. Correspondingly, membership in organizations (i.e., membership density) and general trust...

Resilience has gained significant prominence following the re-examination of the performance of the humanitarian and development aid systems in light of the two major food security crises in East and West Africa over the last two years, coupled with ongoing ‘post-2015’ negotiations on key...

Research in intertemporal choice has been done in a variety of contexts, yet there is a remarkable consensus that future outcomes are discounted (or undervalued) relative to immediate outcomes. In this paper, we (a) review some of the key findings in the literature, (b) critically examine and...

Background: QALYs combine survival and health-related quality of life (QOL) into a single index, enabling judgements about the relative value for money of healthcare interventions. Objective: To investigate the methods used for estimating QALY weights included in submissions by industry for...

Objective: The principle aim of this study was to generate a league table of drugs considered by the Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) for reimbursement. The table was used to test the hypothesis that decisions made by the PBAC are consistent with the maxim of economic...

Managerial judgment is frequently required to estimate many of the parameters of decision calculus models and the quality of these judgmental inputs may substantially affect model-based decisions. This paper suggests that if model builders are to rely upon managerial judgments in building...