The role of the state is finally the decision of the citizens. The government, being a result of elections, can provide more or less protection and increase or decrease expenditures. Anyway for achieving goals and for being performant the state definitly has to promote a good governance. Good...

The past few years have seen a growing trend towards the focus on audit liability. In the UK, the Company Law Reform Bill which became the Companies Act 2006, has removed the previously existing limits on auditor liability and compelled an agreement between the company and the auditor. As well...

An artificial neural network (hence after, ANN) is an information processing paradigm that is inspired by the way biological nervous systems, such as the brain, process information. In previous two decades, ANN applications in economics and finance; for such tasks as pattern reorganization, and...

A linear and lagged relationship between inflation and labor force growth rate has been recently found for the USA. It accurately describes the period after the late 1950s with linear coefficient 4.0, intercept -0.03, and the lag of 2 years. The previously reported agreement between observed and...

Disputes occurring in PPP projects pervade three interfacing levels of agreements: internal, downstream, and peripheral. PPP disputes have been free from arbitral dispute resolution and their legal environment is uncertain and deregulated. While project partners appear to have a natural monopoly...

The principle of uncertain future: the probability of a future event contains a degree of (hidden) uncertainty. As a result, this uncertainty (in a sense, similar to vibrations, fluctuations) pushes the probability value back from the bounds to the middle of its range (from ~100% and ~0% to the...

Public transport (urban and intercity) is organized in Spain both through concession contracts and public ownership. The regulator fixes prices and level of services,as well as the level of subsidy. This paper examines the regulated system in the Spanish bus industry in the last decades.

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Labourer’, is the very troubling issue of ‘wage-stickiness’. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed ‘Golden Age’...

This paper discusses the use of benchmarking in general and its application to the drinking water sector. It systematizes the various classifications on performance measurement, discusses some of the pitfalls of benchmark studies and provides some examples of benchmarking in the water sector....

The principle of uncertain future: the probability of a future event contains an (hidden) uncertainty. The first consequence of the principle: the real values of high probabilities are lower than the preliminarily determined ones; conversely, the real values of low probabilities can be higher...