"This volume compares early modern efforts to provide "public goods" defined as non-market mediated goods not limited to personal relations such as kinship. We examine poverty and famine relief, infrastructure, and forestry in East Asia and Europe, using Japan's Tokugawa era (1603-1868) as a...

We propose a series of kick-off points related to the economic appraisal of large urban infrastructure projects, taking some account of the specifics raised by the Grand Paris Express (GPE) regional automatic metro. The points, in the form of Maintained Hypotheses or Questions in Need of...

Mathematical optimisation models, supported by suitable data, can assist decision making about allocating funds between alternative maintenance tasks and about the size of the maintenance budget. The maintenance optimisation problem is, in essence, to find the optimum balance between the costs...

This paper considers the choice between different approaches to contract for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure projects. The need to control for user costs over the life cycle of an asset is demonstrated to be a core aspect of contract design. The more likely it is that a...

Since the mid 90's, public transport patronage in Île-de-France (the Paris region) has increased substantially: over the last decade alone a 20% growth was observed. This growth, even though it was an aim of the Sustainable Urban Mobility plan adopted in 2000, was not completely anticipated....

Scholarly discussions on economic development in history, specifically those linked to industrialization or modern economic growth, have paid great attention to the formation and development of the market economy as a set of institutions able to augment people's welfare. The role of specific...