These included the phasing-out of compulsory service in rural areas for physicians, the introduction of contract-based employment for physicians and nurses with salary incentives to serve in rural areas, and the introduction of a performance-based payment system intended to improve health worker productivity and quality of services.
Liberalization of Vietnamese agriculture took place over two decades, beginning with the introduction of the contract system in 1981, by which cooperatives contracted farm households to produce a specified amount of crops on the households own plots, but any surplus could be sold on the open market.
The chairman of the Singapore exchange, Victor Liew, said the introduction of the contract should not be seen as a threat to the Hong Kong exchange's contract but rather as a way to promote more liquidity and increase risk-management opportunities.
Finally, the study argues that there is a need before contracting out service provision to consider how the performance of private providers might change when the context within which they are working changes with the introduction of a contract.
Mr. Liew rejected the suggestion by Hong Kong authorities that the introduction of the contract could lead to "regulatory arbitrage," in which investors exploit differences in the rules of the two exchanges.
The inquiry follows an earlier report by the auditor general who found some hospital consultants were working excessively long hours, despite the introduction of a contract that was supposed to deal with the problem 10 years ago.
An instance of this is the introduction of futures contract for natural gas in the 1990 by the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX), which is made possible by the creation of an efficient way to coordinate multiple players in the gas industry by delivering accurate up-to-date information on the price of natural gas, called "hub pricing".
