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Ensuring quality to gain access to global markets : a reform toolkit
In a modern world with rapidly growing international trade, countries compete less based on the availability of natural resources, geographical advantages, and lower labor costs and more on factors related to firms' ability to enter and compete in new markets. One such factor is the ability to demonstrate the quality and safety of goods and services expected by consumers and confirm compliance with international standards. To assure such compliance, a sound quality infrastructure (QI) ecosystem is essential. Jointly developed by the World Bank Group and the National Metrology Institute of Germany, this guide is designed to help development partners and governments analyze a country's quality infrastructure ecosystems and provide recommendations to design and implement reforms and enhance the capacity of their QI institutions.
Book
Effects of a social accountability approach, CARE’s Community Score Card, on reproductive health-related outcomes in Malawi: A cluster-randomized controlled evaluation
Social accountability approaches, which emphasize mutual responsibility and accountability by community members, health care workers, and local health officials for improving health outcomes in the community, are increasingly being employed in low-resource settings. We evaluated the effects of a social accountability approach, CARE's Community Score Card (CSC), on reproductive health outcomes in Ntcheu district, Malawi using a cluster-randomized control design.
We matched 10 pairs of communities, randomly assigning one from each pair to intervention and control arms. We conducted two independent cross-sectional surveys of women who had given birth in the last 12 months, at baseline and at two years post-baseline. Using difference-in-difference (DiD) and local average treatment effect (LATE) estimates, we evaluated the effects on outcomes including modern contraceptive use, antenatal and postnatal care service utilization, and service satisfaction. We also evaluated changes in indicators developed by community members and service providers in the intervention areas.
DiD analyses showed significantly greater improvements in the proportion of women receiving a home visit during pregnancy (B = 0.20, P < .01), receiving a postnatal visit (B = 0.06, P = .01), and overall service satisfaction (B = 0.16, P < .001) in intervention compared to control areas. LATE analyses estimated significant effects of the CSC intervention on home visits by health workers (114% higher in intervention compared to control) (B = 1.14, P < .001) and current use of modern contraceptives (57% higher) (B = 0.57, P < .01). All 13 community- and provider-developed indicators improved, with 6 of them showing significant improvements.
By facilitating the relationship between community members, health service providers, and local government officials, the CSC contributed to important improvements in reproductive health-related outcomes. Further, the CSC builds mutual accountability, and ensures that solutions to problems are locally-relevant, locally-supported and feasible to implement.
Journal Article
A World of Standards but not a Standard World: Toward a Sociology of Standards and Standardization
Standards and standardization aim to render the world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standards are ubiquitous but underappreciated tools for regulating and organizing social life in modernity, and they lurk in the background of many sociological works. Reviewing the relevance of standards and standardization in diverse theoretical traditions and sociological subfields, we point to the emergence and institutionalization of standards, the difficulties of making standards work, resistance to standardization, and the multiple outcomes of standards. Rather than associating standardization with totalizing narratives of globalization or dehumanization, we call for careful empirical analysis of the specific and unintended consequences of different sorts of standards operating in distinct social domains.
Journal Article
An extraordinary scandal : the Westminster expenses crisis and why it still matters
The expenses scandal of 2009 represented Britain's biggest political crisis since the Profumo Affair. Andrew Walker, the tax expert who oversaw the parliamentary expenses system, and Emma Crewe, a social scientist specialising in the institutions of parliament, bring a fascinating insider/outsider perspective to this account.
Book
Repairing The Broken Market For Antibiotic Innovation
Multidrug-resistant bacterial diseases pose serious and growing threats to human health. While innovation is important to all areas of health research, it is uniquely important in antibiotics. Resistance destroys the fruit of prior research, making it necessary to constantly innovate to avoid falling back into a pre-antibiotic era. But investment is declining in antibiotics, driven by competition from older antibiotics, the cost and uncertainty of the development process, and limited reimbursement incentives. Good public health practices curb inappropriate antibiotic use, making return on investment challenging in payment systems based on sales volume. We assess the impact of recent initiatives to improve antibiotic innovation, reflecting experience with all sixty-seven new molecular entity antibiotics approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 1980. Our analysis incorporates data and insights derived from several multistakeholder initiatives under way involving governments and the private sector on both sides of the Atlantic. We propose three specific reforms that could revitalize innovations that protect public health, while promoting long-term sustainability: increased incentives for antibiotic research and development, surveillance, and stewardship; greater targeting of incentives to high-priority public health needs, including reimbursement that is delinked from volume of drug use; and enhanced global collaboration, including a global treaty.
Journal Article
Label Confusion: The Groucho Effect of Uncertain Standards
Labels certify that a product meets some standard for quality, but often consumers are unsure of the exact standard that the label represents. Focusing on the case of ecolabels for environmental quality, we show how even small amounts of uncertainty can create consumer confusion that reduces or eliminates the value to firms of adopting voluntary labels. First, consumers are most suspicious of a label when a product with a bad reputation has it, so labels are often unpersuasive at showing that a seemingly bad product is actually good. Second, label proliferation aggravates the effect of uncertainty, causing the informativeness of labels to decrease rather than increase. Third, uncertainty makes labeling and nonlabeling equilibria more likely to coexist as the number of labels increases, so consumers face greater strategic uncertainty over how to interpret the presence or absence of a label. Finally, a label can be legitimitized or spoiled for other products when a product with a good or bad reputation displays it, so firms may adopt labels strategically to manipulate such information spillovers, which further exacerbates label confusion. Managers can reduce label confusion by supporting mandatory labeling or by undertaking investments to make certain labels \"focal.\"
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
Journal Article
An Institutional Perspective on the Diffusion of International Management System Standards: The Case of the Environmental Management Standard ISO 14001
This paper analyzes how national institutional factors affect the adoption of the international environmental management standard ISO 14001, using a panel of 139 countries from 1996 to 2006. The analysis emphasizes that during the emerging phase of the standard, the potential lack of consensus within the constituents of the national institutional environment concerning the value of a new standard could send mixed signals to firms about the standard. The results show that in the early phase of adoption, regulative and normative forces within the institutional environment can work against each other. Results also show that regulative or coercive forces play a relatively more important role in the early phase of adoption of the standard than in the subsequent phases of diffusion. In the later phases of diffusion of ISO 14001, normative forces, such as the diffusion of other management standards, as well as factors related to trade, play a more important role. Because of the similarities between environmental management standards and corporate social responsibility standards, this study can help identify some of the challenges for diffusion of ISO management standards in the area of social responsibility.
Journal Article