William Zhang

Economic regulation in the healthcare industry has long been a subject of debate, balancing the need for affordability, competition, and innovation. Understanding these regulations is essential, as they directly impact both current and future generations. This paper analyzes the economic implications of regulation within the U.S. Healthcare industry, pulling from specific historical scenarios to analyze the benefits and harms of various viewpoints. This includes FTC antitrust laws, market-based price controls, and more.

As the world has slowly begun to resurface following the aftermath of COVID-19, health policies during the pandemic have also begun to draw attention regarding their effectiveness. Public health policies and pandemic prevention are topics of the utmost importance to the SPRING Group. This brief first provides the economic context from which COVID-19 rose, then provides a cost-benefit analysis of six national-level policies and 7 state-level policies and their economic implications.

Arms transfers are directly linked to human rights. In conflict, transferred weapons and arms split apart families, equipping nations with exponentially larger capacity for destruction and annihilation. Given the nature of arms, access to information about arms transfers is often asymmetric between the public, government stakeholders, state-owned enterprises, and private companies; a trade-off exists between the benefits of making information public and transparent with the downsides of revealing sensitive national security items or trade secrets. In this brief, we review the legal landscape of access to information laws, highlighting applicability to arms transfers to analyze how transparent/accessible information and data regarding arms transfers are in the status quo. We stand in support of the Human Rights Council’s attention on arms transfers, believing that more is needed to involve NGOs, close international loopholes, and track responsible arms usage with technology to uphold human rights for all.