Reshaping the Regional Order of Health Care Resources in China: The Institutional Participants in an Inter-City Integrated Delivery System

Over the past decades, pro-growth policies in China led to rapid economic development but overlooked the provision of health care services. Recently, increasing attention is paid to the emergence of integrated delivery systems (IDS) in China, which is envisioned to consolidate regional health care resources more effectively by facilitating patient referral among hospitals. IDS at an inter-city scale is particularly interesting because it involves both the local governments and the hospitals. Incentives among them will affect the development of an inter-city IDS. This paper thereby builds an economic model to examine both the inter-local government and inter-hospital incentives when participating in an inter-city IDS in China. The findings suggest that while inter-hospital incentives matter, inter-local government incentives should also be considered because the missing incentives at the local government level may oppose the development of inter-city IDSs.

Emergency Politics After Globalization

Exceptional times call for exceptional measures—this formula is all too familiar in the domestic setting. Governments have often played loose with their state's constitution in the name of warding off an urgent threat. But after decades of increasing interconnectedness and emerging transnational governance, today one sees new forms of emergency politics that are cross-border in range. From the European Union to the World Health Organization, from supranational institutions to state governments acting in concert, the logic of emergency is embraced in international contexts, with Covid-19 the latest occasion. This Forum offers an entry-point into this emerging phenomenon. Taking as its point of departure two recent books, it examines the origins, forms, effects and normative stakes of emergency politics beyond the state. Among the matters discussed are the concept of emergency politics, the historical context of its contemporary forms, the patterns of decision-making associated with it, the implications for the legitimacy of transnational institutions, and the constitutional and political ways in which it might be contained. Transnational emergency politics seems likely to remain a central feature of the coming years, and our aim is to further its study in international relations.