The cost of ensuring that information systems were prepared for the Year 2000 (Y2K) were enormous. The U.S. government spent an estimated $8.34 billion [1]. Once the cost borne by state and local governments, public utilities, and the commercial sector are included, the costs in the U.S. alone are staggering. When the Y2K costs from other countries are included, the estimated amount exceeds $3 ...

a r t i c l e i n f o We build a Real Options model to assess the importance of private provision and the impact of expropriation risk on investment timing, business values, governmental costs and social welfare. We consider two types of businesses (essential and non-essential) and two stages (operating businesses and investment opportunities) and answer questions regarding three main topics: t...

Governments subsidize the deployment of solar photovoltaics (PV) because PV is deployed for societal purposes. About seven thousand megawatts were deployed in 2009 and over 10,000 are expected in 2010. Yet this is too slow to strongly affect energy and environmental challenges. Faster societal deployment is slowed because PV is perceived to be too costly. Classic economic evaluations would put ...

This paper describes and examines the schemes established in five EU countries for the recycling of packaging waste. The changes in packaging waste management were mainly implemented since the Directive 94/62/EC on packaging and packaging waste entered into force. The analysis of the five systems allowed the authors to identify very different approaches to cope with the same problem: meet the r...

Abstract: Krugman’s verdict that competitiveness of countries is a largely meaningless concept is a serious misjudgement of the economics profession. Countries compete for the mobile factors of production, most importantly for capital and technology. The exit-option of these factors and of firms changes the calculus of national governments. This paper sets out the main elements of the concept o...

Governments that privatize state industries often retain control over key distribution assets. While there are many examples of this form of partial privatization, to our knowledge there are no substantial quantitative studies of how governments use their control under these circumstances. In this paper we argue that the Russian government privatization of the oil sector during 1994-2003 is a u...

in modern decentralised health systems, district and local managers are increasingly responsible for financing, managing, and delivering healthcare. however, their lack of adequate skills and competencies are a critical barrier to improved performance of health systems. given the financial and human resource, constraints of relying on traditional face-to-face training to upskill a large and dis...