In the Netherlands, the USA and Australia public funding has promoted parental choice by introducing a voucher for child care, where parents are free to choose the provider. The policy experiments in these three countries and the outcomes provide useful information about the consequences of...

The EU advocates a household waste recycling rate of more than 70%. Although the Netherlands already years ago invested in recycling policies heavily, this is still a large challenge as nowadays on average this rate is approximately 50% and nearly no municipalities have a rate above 70%. Given...

Local public service provision can vary greatly because of differences in institutional arrangements, public service markets, and national traditions regarding government intervention. In this paper we compare the procedures adopted by the local governments of the Netherlands and Spain in...

This paper analyzes whether Dutch municipalities became greener between 1999 and 2014 by investigating whether they implement different unit-based pricing systems. Based on their incentive, systems are ranged from green ('weight') to less green ('volume'), or not green ('flat rate'). In...

In the Netherlands, electronic service delivery has become an important issue in many municipalities. Using the Internet for service delivery is seen as an important element of e-government. Based on 2014-2016 panel-data of ICT service delivery for all Dutch municipalities, we show that there is...

Exploring the outcome of Dutch municipal elections between 1998 and 2018, this paper finds two dominant trends: increasing political fragmentation and localism. When explaining localism, the number of inhabitants, regional diversity and the election year dummies are significant. The last result...

The cost-effectiveness of plastic recycling is compared to energy recovery from plastic incineration in a waste-to-energy plant using data for the Netherlands. Both options have specific benefits and costs. The benefits of recycling are the avoidance of both CO2 that otherwise would be emitted...

Sunday shop opening is deregulated to the municipal level in the Netherlands. Despite positive effects on economic growth and employment, many municipalities restrict Sunday shop opening. Based on 2003 data we show that diverse local characteristics, like the size of municipalities and religious...