National policies towards the regulation of the telecommunications industry have undergone significant change in response to technological progress and increasing competition. This article discusses the consecutive revisions of the Swiss regulatory framework during the 1990's and presents lessons to be drawn from this process. After reviewing the Telecommunications Act (Fernmeldegesetz; FMG) 1992 and the reasons for its revision, this article presents the most important prescriptions of the FMG 98 concerning the licence regime, universal service, and interconnection. The implementation of the FMG 98 has led to a fundamental change in regulatory policy. However, transitional rules appear to promote excessively slow adjustments in the current industry configuration.
This paper examines the causes and effects of mobile number portability (MNP) and provides a survey of its implementation in Europe. It first examines the competitive effects and costs of introducing MNP. Next, it discusses how to charge for MNP. It argues that a price cap regime starting from the average cost of porting is likely to provide appropriate incentives. Finally, it reviews recent experience with implementing MNP in Europe. Differences in the speed of porting and porting charges appear to explain part of the differences in the use of MNP across countries.
The author reports on a series of experiments designed to investigate the factor of incentive mechanisms in the case of private provisions of public goods. In the Control treatment, there was no mechanism so that subjects faced strong free-riding incentives. In the so-called Falkinger mechanism treatment, the author implemented the Falkinger mechanism. The studies explored the impact of the mechanism in different economic environments. Results showed that the proposed incentive mechanism is very promising. Section I of the paper introduces the mechanism to be examined. Section II discusses the experimental design. Empirical results are provided in Section III, and Section IV interprets these results followed by a summary.
The observation that average health care expenditure rises with age generally leads experts and laymen alike to conclude that population ageing is the main driver of health care costs. In recently published studies we challenged this view (Zweifel et al., 1999; Felder et al., 2000). Analysing health care expenditure of deceased persons, we showed that age is insignificant if proximity to death is controlled for. Thus, we argued that population ageing per se will not have a significant impact on future health care expenditure. Several authors (Salas and Raftery, 2001; Dow and Norton, 2002; Seshamani and Gray, 2004a) disputed the robustness of these findings, pointing to potential weaknesses in the econometric methodology. This paper revisits the debate and provides new empirical evidence, taking into account the methodological concerns that have been raised. We also include surviving individuals to test for the possibility that the relative importance of proximity to death and age differs between the deceased and survivors. The results vindicate our earlier findings of no significant age effect on health care expenditure of the deceased. However, with respect to the survivors, we find that age may matter. Still, a naive estimation that does not control for proximity to death will grossly overestimate the effect of population ageing on aggregate health care expenditure. Following Stearns and Norton (2004), we conclude that "it is time for time to death" in projections of future health care costs.
The objective of this contribution is to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the Swiss health care system after the new Law on Health Insurance (LHI) that took effect at the beginning of 1996. The LHI just barely survived a popular referendum. An important argument of the campaign in its favor had been that health insurance premiums would fall thanks to increased competition between the sickness funds (mutual health insurers). At the same time, the federal government hoped that its budget would be less burdened by subsidies earmarked for health insurance. Neither expectation has been fulfilled, not least because Parliament made the list of benefits covered more comprehensive than ever. Thus, the health share in the GDP has continued to grow, from 9.5% in 1996 to some 11% in 2003 (OECD, 2004).
This is a very colorful paper that makes for interesting reading. The author shows that the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) increasingly does not decide about market access to drugs only, but influences the innovation process as a whole. And although "information" does not appear in the title of the paper, the distribution of knowledge as affected by the FDA plays an important role at several stages of this process. For this reason, the body of this commentary is arranged according to the stages of the innovation process.
One important motive for deregulating social health insurance is to encourage product innovation. For the first time, the cost savings achieved by non-US managed care plans that are attributable to product innovation are estimated, using a novel approach. Panel data from a major Swiss health insurer permits to infer health status, which can be used to predict health care expenditure. The econometric evidence suggests that the managed care plans benefit from risk selection effects. In the case of the health maintenance organization (HMO) plan, however, the pure innovation effect may account for as much as two-thirds of the cost advantage.
A nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) is performed on hospitals in the federal state of Saxony (Germany) and in Switzerland. This study is of interest from three points of view. First, contrary to most existing work, patient days are not treated as an output but as an input. Second, the usual DEA assumption of a homogeneous sample is tested and rejected for a large part of the observations. The proposed solution is to restrict DEA to comparable observations in the two countries. The finding continues to be that hospitals of Saxony have higher efficiency scores than their Swiss counterparts. The finding proves robust with regard to modifications of DEA that are motivated by differences in hospital planning in Germany and Switzerland.
Rational agents can express discontent with a given distribution of income by threatening to disrupt an economy, if such a threat is profitable. This paper describes such circumstances in a two-class model. Social stability constraints define the acceptable set of income distributions, the range of which is determined by the extent to which income-generating abilities are vulnerable to disruption. Opportunities for disruption vary across stages of economic development. There is possibly no stable distribution in a low developed economy, whereas in an advanced economy, characterized by complex and interdependent production, stable distributions exist. This distinction provides a basis for the observed increasing significance of social stabilization by redistributive policy in the course of economic development.
