Premarital screening policies are increasingly adopted to prevent hereditary disorders in populations with high consanguinity. In Oman, a Middle Eastern country with significant sickle cell disease prevalence, the shift toward mandatory premarital screening emerged through a strategic policy process influenced by cultural, tribal, and religious values. In this context, premarital screening offers a critical opportunity for early detection and informed reproductive decision-making. This paper provides an explanatory analysis of the agenda-setting process that enabled the formal adoption of compulsory premarital screening for genetic disorders, using Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) as an analytical lens. The analysis demonstrates how hereditary blood disorders, in particular Sickle cell disease (SCD), transitioned from a socially normalised condition to a recognised public health and socioeconomic problem, and how a technically feasible and ethically sensitive policy solution was advanced. Oman’s case illustrates how preventive health policies targeting socially sensitive issues can gain traction through stream convergence, and incremental reframing.

Most European universities lag behind the best universities in the Anglo-Saxon world. A key challenge is to raise resources per student in Europe to US levels. The Lisbon agenda demands fundamental reform of the European university system in order to enhance efficiency, yet avoid grade inflation, to foster more competition, to allow for much larger private contributions accompanied by income-contingent student loans, and to attract larger numbers of foreign students. European universities will be pushed to compete with each other, to offer better incentives and to generate substantially more income. Universities will be stimulated to provide sufficient diversity and quality to meet the demands of a growing and diverse student body. Their ambition should be to educate the best minds in society irrespective of whether their parents are rich or poor, academically inclined or uneducated. A shift from grants to loans and an increase in tuition fees are justified by high returns. Reform should lead to a better and more equitable system of European universities.

The openness of decision-makers to be influenced by and invest in proposals for policy reform is not constant. Timing is key, as are the diversity and depth of interests, levels of knowledge, and nature of the policy challenge itself; these can all affect how governments absorb information that might fall beyond the usual cost-benefit assessments of day-to-day policymaking. This essay explores how and when the policy environment provides opportunities to introduce a more nuanced discussion of competing moral values in migration governance and, critically, the new policy directions to which they might give rise. In doing so, it will utilize a range of examples from national, EU, and global debates of the past decade, to highlight moments when a dilemmas approach has been—or could have been—useful to effect policy change. Stressing ethical dilemmas can influence migration policymakers when the conditions are right.

We study the 2017 pension reform in Finland, raising the statutory retirement age of the studied cohorts from 63 to 63 years and 6 months. Using monthly-based register data and a differences-in-differences approach, we estimate the reform’s impact on retirement, employment, unemployment, disability, sickness, and inactivity. Results indicate a significant 19-percentage-point increase in employment between the old and new retirement ages, alongside notable rises in unemployment, inactivity, and disability. Largely – but not entirely – this stems from the persistence of the previous labor market state. Gender differences are not large, but the effects vary considerably across education, income, employment sector, and self-employment status.

A scholarly consensus depicts strong, autonomous domestic women's movements as critical for the passage of gender equality reforms, alongside openings in domestic and international political contexts. What, then, is a nascent women's movement seeking gender equality reforms to do if it lacks strength or a history of autonomous organizing? A long-term analysis of the Guatemalan women's movement's push for reforms to address violence against women demonstrates that one potential road forward is through a “politics of patience,” rooted in the pursuit of cumulative, incremental victories. Adopting a politics of patience allows nascent domestic movements in developing and post-transition contexts to achieve incremental victories that create future political openings while simultaneously building movement strength and autonomy over time. This finding highlights the temporal and strategic power of women's movements, as well as the iterative and potentially reinforcing nature of social mobilization and political reform.

Increasing the minimum retirement age is a widespread option chosen by policy makers to reduce spending in financially constrained public pension systems. Yet, the effectiveness of such a reform strongly depends on the ability of individuals to postpone their withdrawal from the labor force. In this paper, we study the immediate impact of the 2010 reform of the French pension system by carrying out a short-term evaluation on the increase of the statutory eligibility age from 60 to 61. We use a differences-in-differences methodology, comparing the trajectories from work to retirement for succeeding generations facing a different statutory age. Using a detailed social security administrative database, we provide a global assessment of the effects of the reform, accounting for the potential substitution effects from old-age insurance toward unemployment, sickness or disability insurance schemes. Our findings suggest that despite a sizable effect on the employment rate, the reform also strongly increased unemployment and disability rates.

Ambiguity – the capacity to have multiple meanings – is endemic to politics. Ambiguity creates political opportunities, structures debates and provides leeway for political entrepreneurs to advance their interests. I use the 2012 passage and 2014 rollback of reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program to show how ambiguity enables political entrepreneurship. In this puzzling case, Congress enacted and rolled back changes that threatened to impose politically unpalatable costs. Using semi-structured interviews and congressional testimony, I show how political entrepreneurs engaged with ambiguity in the buildup to the reforms’ passage. They used information strategically to interpret problems, solutions, rules, and goals; shape legislators’ perceptions of the reforms’ political implications; and adapt their arguments to the policy windows that opened. The case shows that ambiguity facilitates policy reform, but the direction of change depends on the priorities that are salient when a policy window opens and on the interests of political entrepreneurs.

Promotion programs that subsidize advertising for exported agricultural products continue to be used despite much criticism that they are an inefficient use of taxpayer money. At the same time, others have advocated for an increase in funds to support domestic advertising for fruits and vegetables. We investigate the economic and nutritional effects from changes in both export and domestic promotion expenditures for horticultural and nonhorticultural commodities. Simulation results show that even modest decreases in trade promotion expenditures coupled with a corresponding increase in domestic promotion efforts have the capacity to influence domestic market conditions, caloric intake, and nutrient consumption.

This article explores an agency model in which voters learn about both an incumbent and an opponent. They observe the incumbent’s policy record and update their beliefs about his opponent via a campaign. Although the former is relatively more informative, it can be costly for the voter to learn about the incumbent from her policy record. This is because policy reforms, which allow a voter to learn an incumbent’s ability, are risky and can leave the voter worse off. Then the voter may prefer the incumbent to take safer actions. The efficient level of reform – the one preferred by the voter – balances the value of learning with the expected policy costs/benefits. In a world where the opponent’s campaign is uninformative, reform can be too low due to the incumbent’s fear of failure. Or it can be too high: the incumbent may gamble on success. This article shows that the presence of an opponent who can reveal information via a campaign exacerbates these inefficiencies. An incumbent who anticipates the effect of an opponent’s campaign on voter beliefs is more likely to make inefficient policy choices. Further, such campaigns can lead to an overall welfare loss when they reveal little about the opponent’s ability and yet have an impact on the incumbent’s policy choice.

A well-developed thesis in political economy claims that crises create opportunities for change. Yet despite creating similar preferences for change, the Asian financial crisis led to reform of policies and institutions in some issue areas and in some countries of Southeast Asia, but not in others. In this essay I find that policies and institutions associated with technological upgrading of the economy, and particularly the manufacturing sector, are often immune to reform efforts, for two reasons. First, reform demands that policymakers know what to do; and second, they must know how to do it. Whether countries can discover and adopt new “templates” for reforming technology policies and institutions depends on the capacity of preexisting institutions to foster participative rather than simply consultative public-private collaboration. Such collaboration is most likely when decentralized yet coordinated bureaucracies facilitate meaningful participation from private actors, including business, labor, and academia, in forming, implementing, monitoring, and enforcing development policies.

The 1995 Farm Bill debate proved different than many economists expected. It was overwhelmingly budget-driven. Few early concerns about the role of government, efficiency, equity, competitiveness, environment, rural development, and food were addressed. Economic analysis played a different role than anticipated. Models of who and how farm policy is made proved misleading; the debate circumvented the traditional process. Economic models were used more to perform budget accounting than substantive analysis. And their substantive analyses often failed to capture the attention of policymakers. Hence, while a reformist economist's dream, the bill leaves as many issues unanswered as it addresses.

Activists try to use high profile trials to advance their political agendas, and we want to understand why they occasionally succeed in promoting policy reforms. We begin by reviewing literature on agenda setting and social problem construction, conceptualising high profile trials as “focusing events” that offer activists a chance to advance their definitions and remedies for particular social problems. We next outline the feminist movement against sexual violence as a useful example of activists trying to use trials for their own political purposes. Using events data from the New York Times and the secondary treatment of 13 high profile trials from 1960 to 1997, we examine factors that help or hinder activists’ efforts to use a trial to forward their cause. We see that both the nature of the trial and the political context surrounding it affect the likelihood that a movement gains control of its meaning and secures policy reform.

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growth rate of real per capita income, say, 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy changes affecting several generations, by reducing the dynamic problem to a static one. A necessary condition is time invariance, which is satisfied by any common solution concept in an overlapping-generations model with exogenous growth. This tool is applied to derive the discount rate for cost–benefit analysis under two different utilitarian welfare functions: classical and relative. It is only with relative utilitarianism, and assuming time-invariance of the set of alternatives (policies), that the discount rate is well defined for a heterogeneous society at a balanced growth equilibrium, is corroborated by an independent principle equating values of human lives, and equals the growth rate of real per-capita income.