We model agents’ incentives to invest in production of export goods when governments are commitment constrained with respect to their trade obligations. Once irreversible investments have been undertaken, the governments have incentives to renegotiate the tariff rates to higher values. The renegotiations are costly; the greater the tariff rate adjustment, the greater the expenses. We find that ...

Service provision by local governments can be delivered using in-house bureaucracies, private firms, and partnerships with other governments or the not-forprofit sector. This production decision has been a major focus of discussion among scholars, practitioners and political agents for the last quarter of a century. The transaction costs framework is an important tool to analyse decisions regar...

Governments are continually looking to save costs in providing services especially with the economic crunch. Studies have shown that there is some form of reluctance to transact with governments over the internet even when it is cost saving and efficient. This is especially true where no policies mandating the utilization of e-government transactional web services (EgovTWS) exist and situations...

Ramsey pricing has been proposed in the pharmaceutical industry as a principle to price discriminate among markets while allowing to recover the (fixed) R&D cost. However, such analyses neglect the presence of insurance or the fund raising costs for drug reimbursement. By incorporating these new elements, we aim at providing some building blocks towards an economic theory merging Ramsey pricing...

The growing interest in e-Government raises the question of how governments can increase citizen adoption and usage of their online government services. e-Government becomes especially important given its potential to reduce costs and improve service compared with alternative traditional modes. Citizen trust is proposed to be an important catalyst of e-Government adoption. By investigating onli...

Transportation networks and governments are both hierarchically organized. In some states state government finances most of the highways, while in other states similar roads are financed locally. Larger governments attain scale economies. However they also tend to be more bureaucratic and have higher operating costs, all else equal, due to problems such as span of control. This study relates hi...

To combat adverse selection, governments increasingly base payments to health plans and providers on enrollees’ scores from risk-adjustment formulae. In 2004, Medicare began to risk-adjust capitation payments to private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to reduce selection-driven overpayments. But because the variance of medical costs increases with the predicted mean, incentivizing enrollment of i...

The Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard provides a step-bystep guide for companies and government agencies to use in quantifying and reporting their GHG emissions. This set of standards was developed by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative, a partnership convened by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Develop...

The Kyoto Protocol is the first international environmental agreement that sets legally binding greenhouse gas emissions targets and timetables for Annex I countries. Its Article 17 authorizes emissions trading among Annex B countries. If properly designed, emissions trading can effectively reduce their abatement costs, while assisting Annex I countries in achieving their Kyoto obligations. If ...

New global standards of governance are emerging. Citizens of developing countries are demanding better performance on the part of their governments, and they are increasingly aware of the costs of poor management and corruption. Attitudes are also changing in industrial countries where bribery is no longer viewed as a legitimate cost of doing business overseas. At the World Bank and other inter...