The adoption of proper rules of normalisation is in general considered a trivial problem which deserves little attention. Possibly for that very reason errors in normalisation have resulted in flawed interpretations of the conditions for optimal commodity taxation. We state based on an explicit...

Policy analysis in applied fields such as agricultural, trade, environmental and development policy is still often undertaken within a first-best, rather than a more realistic second-best framework. The present paper seeks to contribute to changing this state of affairs by providing an intuitive...