This thesis consists of four papers studying economic aspects of natural resource and environmental management in Namibia. <p> Paper [I] analyses changes in Namibian energy use patterns between 1980 and 1998. The study finds that, unlike their counterparts in many other developing countries where...</p>

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>

This paper addresses vertical fiscal externalities in a model where the state governments provide health care and the federal government provides a sickness benefit. Both levels of government tax labor income and policy decisions affect labor income as well as participation in the labor market....

There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

In this paper, we analyze the welfare effects of publicly provided health care in an economy where the consumers have "present-biased" preferences due to quasi-hyperbolic discounting. The analysis is based on a two-type model with asymmetric information between the government and the private...

We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...