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In health insurance markets with regulated competition, regulators face the challenge of preventing risk selection. This paper provides a framework for analyzing the scope (i.e., potential actions by insurers and consumers) and incentives for risk selection in such markets. Our approach consists of three steps. First, we describe four types of risk selection: (a) selection by consumers in and out of the market, (b) selection by consumers between high- and low-value plans, (c) selection by insurers via plan design, and (d) selection by insurers via other channels such as marketing, customer service, and supplementary insurance. In a second step, we develop a conceptual framework of how regulation and features of health insurance markets affect the scope and incentives for risk selection along these four dimensions. In a third step, we use this framework to compare nine health insurance markets with regulated competition in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the United States., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

After the melamine milk scandal in 2008, China's global imports of dairy products soared, especially after FTAs had been established with Australia and New Zealand. The dairy products of the two countries have a unique competitive trading advantage in the Chinese market. However, at a time when Chinese consumers are increasingly dependent on imported dairy products, a succession of whey protein scandals affecting New Zealand's dairy products in 2013 had a negative psychological impact on Chinese importers and consumers, and this even affected the import status of New Zealand dairy imports to the Chinese market. The present paper, based on the United Nations Comtrade Harmonized System, studies the role of Australia and New Zealand in China's dairy market. It calculates the trade competitiveness index, revealing the relative competitive advantages of Australia and New Zealand, and investigates the impact of the dairy products from these countries on China's imports from the rest of the world across six dairy sectors in the period 1992⁻2017. We find that, under the food safety laws, the relative dairy import prices, milk scandals, and Free Trade Agreements, together with the competitive advantages of Australia and New Zealand, had a varied impact on the corresponding Chinese dairy imports across the relevant sectors in the context of China food safety laws after the melamine milk scandal. These findings acknowledge Australia and New Zealand's competitiveness in the international dairy trade, and also lead to suggestions regarding their competitiveness and sustainable development in the Chinese market.

There is a lack of awareness among Australian and New Zealand medical practitioners about how competition law applies to them. In this article, basic legal issues relating to interaction between medical practitioners (which all medical practitioners should be aware of) are discussed. The New Zealand Ophthalmologists Case and some relevant Australian and United States cases are analysed. Three key areas of competition law (of relevance to medical practitioners) are identified as being important and relevant. In conclusion, medical practitioners must be able to distinguish between legal and illegal activities; and guidelines outlined in this paper provide some clarification.

Objective: The efficiency of regulation of public health risks has been questioned on the grounds that the costs of regulation may outweigh the benefits. There are strong arguments that risk management is best left to the market place, where individual consumers can make the trade-off between risk and the forgone benefits of reduced consumption of hazardous products. The paper reviews the economic arguments for the regulation of health risks and the use of safety standards., Results: There are five key arguments for regulation of public health risks. Consumers misperceive the hazards of products and therefore take more risks than they would if fully informed. The provision of information has certain public goods characteristics (it is non-rival). There may be economies of scale in collecting, providing and disseminating information that is costly to acquire. The private decision maker may not be the person bearing the whole risk, exposing others to risk e.g. children. If public policy has chosen to provide public finance for health care it may be efficient to discourage risk taking by individuals even if that risk taking is optimal from the individual's perspective., Conclusion: There are arguments for public intervention to reduce private health risks and regulation of risk is a legitimate tool to achieve the socially optimal level of risk in certain circumstances. Private subjective assessment of risk may not capture the full social benefits of risk reduction. Regulation by safety standards however may fail to capture the full range of concerns about risk, including avoiding catastrophe, taking personal control of risk, and a distrust of expert opinion.

Multilevel modelling is a relatively new technique developed in the area of educational research. To illustrate the use of this technique in health economics, this paper estimates a multilevel logit model to examine the effect of competition on the behaviour of Australian general practitioners. The main hypothesis tested is that GPs in areas of high competition are more likely to recommend a follow up consultation compared to GPs in areas of low competition. The results suggest that competition influences the decision to recommend a follow up visit for one out of the five medical conditions analysed. The use of multilevel analysis represents a methodological improvement on previous models of GP behaviour. However, before multilevel analysis is more widely adopted it is argued that it should be more formally assessed against more standard and equivalent methods already used by economists, such as random effects panel data models.

This paper examines the effect of competition on the behaviour of Australian general practitioners. The paper represents a considerable improvement on the methods of previous studies by using a random effects probit model in a multilevel modelling framework to obtain a more robust estimate of the effect of GP density, by including data on GP and practice characteristics and by using data with the actual GP consultation as the unit of observation which are disaggregated by medical condition. This latter characteristic enables us to test the hypothesis that the effect of competition varies across medical conditions. The main hypothesis tested is that GPs in areas of high competition are more likely to recommend a follow-up consultation compared to GPs in areas of low competition. The results suggest that the density of GPs influences the decision to follow up for one out of the four medical conditions analysed. However, there are other issues to be resolved before such results can be confidently interpreted as evidence of the effect of competition and as evidence of supplier-induced demand.

Most developed countries are experiencing, or moving at full speed, to implement new forms of health delivery based in part on capitation arrangements and stronger accountability of health service providers. Proposals for introduction of capitation or managed care have been advanced in Australia but have attracted strong opposition from the medical profession. This paper reviews the policy issues surrounding the introduction of managed care, including how Australia's current institutional forms may evolve into managed care provision.