Global environmental problems are often assumed to imply extensive inefficiencies since there is no global authority corresponding to the government at a national level. This paper shows, on the contrary, that rich countries in a free unregulated market may still undertake globally efficient...

Road safety has become an increasing concern in developed countries due to the significant amount of fatalities and the associated economic losses. Only in 2005 these losses rose to 200,000 million euros, a considerable sum approximately 2% of GDP that easily justifies any public intervention....

One of the limitations of cross-country health expenditure analysis refers to the fact that the financing, the internal organization and political restraints of health care decision-making are country-specific and heterogeneous. Yet, a potential solution is to examine the influence of such...

This paper examines the economic and political conditions that influence people’s attitudes regarding a municipality break-up. The theoretical model predicts intra-municipal differences in tax bases, political preferences, and population size to affect the expected gain from secession. The...

This paper discusses how a benevolent policy maker should act based on some, possibly non-welfaristic,ethical principle in cases where people's preferences are not perfectly informed,consistent and fully developed with regard to all goods, including all kinds of environmental goods, as is...

A great deal of biodiversity can be found in private forests, and protecting it requires taking into consideration the preferences of key stakeholders. In this study, we examine and compare the valuation of forest attributes across the general public, private non-industrial forest owners and...

Various decentralization experiments are currently underway in the Chinese forestry sector. However, a key question often ignored by researchers and policy makers is what farmers really want from reform. This paper addresses this question using a survey-based choice experiment. We investigated...

This paper provides the latest research developments in the method of choice experiments applied to valuation of non-market goods. Choice experiments, along with the, by now, well-known contingent valuation method, are very important tools for valuing non-market goods and the results are used in...

The study of the effects that different types of infrastructre have supposed in the regional growth is a topic that has been widely analysed from final eighties. One of the methodologies used for it is the Cost-Benefit analysis which permits an individual study of each project to advise...