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In developing countries healthcare reforms are increasingly advocated and implemented in association with global developmental agendas. This thesis analyses the process of health sector reforms in Punjab by looking at the reform drivers, strategies and implementation and examines the elite motivation to reform. Responding to the empirical gap, one underlying objective is to map health sector reforms in Punjab at the primary and secondary level health facilities with respect to drivers, content, design and implementation. Bureaucrats and administrative elite hold a central role in the design and implementation of public management reforms, but in the context of developing countries with political instability and chronic budget deficits; it evaluates how the bureaucratic elites adopt, design and implement reforms. An abductive research approach is used, to investigate Punjab as a case study of health sector reforms at the primary and secondary level health facilities. The organisational context of the study enables the investigation of seven health reform programmes in Punjab, managed and implemented at the provincial and district level. The central argument of the thesis is that the process of reforms in developing countries is a political one. Administrative elites, central to the design and implementation of reforms tend to focus more on the reform trajectory and “what” to implement, and underemphasise implementation. Using data from an in-depth case study of Punjab with two embedded subunits of Lahore and Kasur selected on the basis of urban and rural demographics, this research triangulates between different datasets (bureaucracy, professionals, staff and service users) and documentary sources such as reports, documents, legislation etc. in addition to locating findings and arguments in public management, as a field of literature. The study provides evidence that devolution and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals largely drive health care reform in Punjab. Both reform and development agendas are funded by financial assistance from international financial institutions and donor organisations, and the implementation is top-down with little or no engagement with professionals, staff and service users. There is lack of motivational engagement with professionals and staff, who have no input in decision-making. The reform process lacks citizen engagement (ignorant service user) and accountability from the citizens. The adoption of reform agenda is highly driven by the fact that reforms consistent with global development agendas like UNMDGs bring in funds and resources in economically unstable environment faced by the country in general. Findings suggest that the reform process in developing countries needs to be understood in a much broader context and needs to incorporate the role international organisations play in determining the reform agenda. Reform adoption is highly dependent on the political activity and motivations of the administrative elites. Firstly, the existing models of reform are inadequate and focus on the institutional forces, rather than the individual motivations of the policy makers. Secondly, developing countries facing fiscal and economic stresses as well as unstable political institutions suffer from a skewed power imbalance where the power is concentrated in elites that results in a self-serving bureaucracy. This study contributed to the literature on reform process in developing countries by suggesting implications for research on reforms in the developing world, which includes the political and tactical motivation of the key actors in the reform process.

New Zealand's public sector reforms have been hailed as a model of theoretical consistency and coherence. The associated financial management reforms, known internationally as new public financial management (NPFM), were world-leading although they are no longer unique. The underlying nature and intent of public sector reforms have been the subject of considerable debate internationally. Early public sector reforms openly sought privatisation, often on ideological grounds. However, in the face of gathering public opposition, public discussion of privatisation softened. NPM and NPFM have been promoted instead mainly on more pragmatic grounds such as improving public sector performance. In New Zealand, the Public Finance Act 1989 is the key legislation underpinning the financial management reforms. The Act delegates regulatory powers to the Treasury and, over time, a considerable body of secondary regulation, including accounting rules, has been developed. However, this secondary regulation, and its contribution to the success or otherwise of the public sector reforms, has not been examined in detail to date. In 1999, New Zealand s Controller and Auditor-General suggested that the financial management system erodes government departments resources and that somehow this resource erosion escapes parliamentary scrutiny. The Treasury, on the other hand, defended the foundations of the financial management system as solid, arguing that retention of the existing framework would allow further and faster progress towards improved performance and value-for-money than would be achieved by a new set of reforms. This debate prompts questions whether and, if so, how and why a financial management system, ostensibly implemented to improve the performance and accountability of the public sector, could be linked to such effects, and whether parliamentary scrutiny is indeed avoided. This thesis examines the secondary regulation and explains the development of the financial management system with the intention of answering those questions. The analysis undertaken in this thesis suggests that New Zealand's public sector financial management system fabricates the conditions under which privatisation initiatives might be accepted for pragmatic reasons. The erosion of departments financial resources is an essential mechanism in that fabrication process. As this system has developed, the time available for parliamentary scrutiny has reduced and the Controller and Auditor-General s controller function has been eroded, while the control and discretion exercised within the Treasury has increased. Arguably, these developments have helped to conceal the system s privatising intent. The thesis identifies features of the financial management system used to rationalise the financial resource-eroding processes. It also notes that if New Zealand's financial management system is no longer unique, then other NPFM systems may contain a similar combination of features.

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This paper deals with the reforms in the Japanese economy after year 2001. The goal is to describe and assess the most importanr reforms. The first part deals with the PM Koizumi's reforms (in office 2001 - 2006). The second part is about reforms after Koizumi's withdrawal till the onset of a new government in September 2009. The last part deals with the planned reforms of the current cabinet.

This work evaluates the current situation in the six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The main areas of evaluation are the ongoing reforms, the proposed monetary union and the relationship with the United States. As for the reforms, the main focus is the transition from a closed to an open market economy and the mitigation of their oil dependence. Furthermore, the following chapter deals with an analysis of the Optimum Currency Area for the GCC region. Finally, the last chapter is aimed to provide a brief insight into the US-GCC relationship and its prospects in the near future.

The diploma thesis examines the implicit pension debt in the fifteen EU countries. The Holzmann et al. (2011) methodology is applied to show the impact of population ageing on the pension systems in the EU. The implicit pension debts demonstrate the considerable hidden debt burden in the all fifteen countries. The implicit pension debts range in the interval from 47 % of GDP for the Czech Republic to 906 % for Greece. Nine of the analyzed countries record the implicit pension debts in the interval 100 - 300 % of GDP. The sensitivity analysis and the comparison with other studies confirm our findings. The thesis points out sizeable imbalances among the particular countries, genders and age cohorts.