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ABSTRACTMarket‐oriented reforms in the health sector continue to dominate health policy agendas in many developing countries despite growing evidence of their negative impacts. This article critically examines eight key arguments that are used to justify market‐oriented reforms and that continue to hold widespread appeal among policy makers and analysts. The authors conclude that although the axiom that health care is atypical due to pervasive market failures is widely acknowledged by reformers, the scope and depth of the negative consequences of market competition and private sector involvement are systematically underestimated in policy design and implementation, while the regulatory capacity to overcome them is overestimated. Their analysis suggests that while there is considerable scope for market‐oriented reforms, the success of such reforms depends on a tight set of conditions that are often absent in the health care sector, especially but not exclusively in developing countries.

The decline in popularity of New Public Management worldwide reinvigorated the search for a new paradigm in the field of public administration. Several alternatives to New Public Management, such as the New Governance and Public Value paradigms, have gained prominence in recent years. Despite tensions among these paradigms, exceptional challenges for public administration teaching programs exist. Xun Wu and Jingwei He of the National University of Singapore compiled data on public administration and management courses from 48 top master of public administration degree programs in China and the United States. This essay analyzes how competing paradigms influenced the selection of course content and pedagogical foci in professional training curricula. The authors conclude that in order to take advantage of an unprecedented opportunity provided by the rapid, global expansion of professional education in public administration, there is an urgent need to find a synthesized theoretical framework.

This paper compares health policy trends in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand with the purpose of drawing usable lessons in reform. The study finds that governments in the region are rapidly privatizing the provision of healthcare at the same time as they are expanding the government's role in financing. The paper argues that expansion of public financing at the same time as private provision is misconceived as the combination would aggravate instances and severity of market failures peculiar to the sector. The dysfunctional trend is particularly evident in Indonesia and the Philippines. In Thailand, in contrast, the expansion of public financing has occurred in the context of a health system dominated by public providers, which has had the effect of restraining healthcare costs. Malaysia occupies a mid position between Indonesia and the Philippines on the one hand and Thailand on the other. All four cases underline the value of state capacity in designing optimal policies and implementing them effectively. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

1: Policy Capacity: Conceptual Framework and Essential Components; Wu Xun, M Ramesh and Michael Howlett -- Part I -- Conceptual and Measurement Issues -- 2: Policy Capacity in Public Administration; B. Guy Peters -- 3: Policy Analytical Capacity: The Supply and Demand for Policy Analysis in Government; Michael Howlett -- 4: Measuring Policy Capacity through Governance Indices; Kris Hartley and Jingru Zhang -- 5: Measuring Policy Analytical Capacity for the Environment: A Case for Engaging New Actors; Angel Hsu -- Part II -- Theoretical and Empirical Issues -- 6: Innovation and the State: Towards an Evolutionary Theory of State Capacity; Erkki Karo and Reiner Kattel -- 7: The Role of Analysts in Public Agencies: Toward an Empirically Grounded Typology; Karol Olejniczak, Paweł Śliwowski and Rafał Trzciński -- 8: Policy Analytical Practice Investigated: Exploring Sectoral Patterns in Use of Policy Analytical Techniques; Ellen Fobé, Valerie Pattyn and Marleen Brans -- 9: Government's Credible Accountability and Strategic Policy Capacity: Evidence from the Asian NICs of Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore; Fiona Yap -- 10: Does Political Legitimacy Matter for Policy Capacity? A Cross-National Study of Perceived Legitimacy; Honorata Mazepus -- 11: Interest Groups and Policy Capacity: Modes of Engagement, Policy Goods and Networks; Carsten Daugbjerg, Bert Fraussen and Darren Halpin -- Part III -- Case Studies -- 12: Building Organizational Political Capacity through Policy Learning: Communicating with Citizens on Health and Safety in the UK; Claire A. Dunlop -- 13: Exploring Capacity for Strategic Policy Work: Water Policy in Australia; Yvette Bettini and Brian Head -- 14: Philanthropic Foundations in the City Policy Process: a Perspective on Policy Capacity from the United States; Madeleine Pill -- 15: Policy Capacity within a Federation: The Case of Australia; Scott Brenton -- 16: Dynamic Mechanisms for Resolving Collective Incidents in China: A Policy Capacity Analysis; Jieren Hu, Guoqin Wang and Jingyan Fei -- 17: Policy-Related Expertise and Policy Work in Czech Political Parties: Theory and Methods; Martin Polasek, Vilém Novotny, and Michel Perottino -- 18: The Dynamic Nature of Policy Capacity: Internet Policy in Italy, Belarus and Russia; Nina Belyaeva.

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SummaryDecentralization reforms rarely live up to the high hopes and expectations of the reformers for a variety of reasons rooted in actions and omissions of the governments pursuing it or in the context in which it is undertaken. The paper examines the experience of Zhejiang Province where decentralization was successful in achieving and indeed exceeding initial expectations. The remarkable feature of its reforms was 'performance‐based' decentralization wherein localities showing superior performance were awarded additional autonomy at a faster speed while the rest were given additional support to build their capacity for assuming more responsibility in the future. To understand the effects of this unique pattern of decentralization, the paper compares the performance of participating and non‐participating counties under five waves of reforms between 1992 and 2008, based on indicators such as gross domestic product, industrial output and local government revenue. It finds that performance‐based decentralization not only helped overcome the problem of capacity deficits but also fostered capacity in weaker counties to assume more autonomy in the future. The paper confirms that speed and sequence of transfer of autonomy and responsibilities to local governments are as important as the content of decentralization. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

While local government entrepreneurship has long been regarded as one of the main drivers of China's economic growth, it has increasingly been recognised as a potential source of a set of harmful policy consequences in recent years, such as rising government debt crises, pervasive corruption and environmental degradation. These criticisms have prompted questions about what types of entrepreneurship might be more desirable, and which incentive structures might be necessary to pave the way for the right kind of local government entrepreneurship. The articles in this special issue focus on new developments in local government entrepreneurship from a public policy perspective. Collectively, they explore the normative dimensions of local government entrepreneurship in China, with an emphasis on necessary policy changes to shape local government entrepreneurship in contributing to economic growth as well as other key policy objectives. (China/GIGA)