The treatment of owner-occupied housing costs is a recurring problem in the construction of consumer price indices, and there are competing methodologies. In the most widely-used Irish index, the Payments Approach, which attaches a weight to a term involving historical house prices and an...

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects on householder behaviour of the introduction of pay-by-weight as a method of charging households for waste collection. It is well known that, in theory, such charges would reduce the amount of waste collected but whether and how this would...

This paper provides updated estimates for the scale of fuel poverty in the Republic of Ireland using two measures: one based on fuel expenditure as a share of income and the other based on self-reported deprivation. It also presents modelling results as to the characteristics of households most...

The purpose of this study is to check the monetary value of the recreational use of Irish forests using two different valuation methods on the one dataset - the Travel Cost Method and the Contingent Valuation Technique - and in doing so test convergent validity, i.e. whether they are consistent...

The understanding of natural laws underlies the research programme so that we can 'obey nature' and thereby develop in a sustainable way - but let us not forget that human behaviour is part of nature's ways too. Human nature must also be understood. Socio-economic research, which looks into how...

An Energy Service Company (ESCO) is a firm that offers to reduce its client's energy bill, with the cost saving being split with the client. ESCOs in the full sense of the term offer finance for their projects, will accept the risk of the project and are remunerated in proportion to the savings...

This report was financed by and prepared for the use of the European Commission, Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. The MEDIS project was coordinated by Patrick Simon from the Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques and Martin Clément from Economie et...