Biofuels are increasingly being regarded as an energy source with potential to address problems in several areas, such as those found in the areas of climate change, environmental degradation, energy supply and energy security. We take a look at biofuels through the lens of modern resource...

The objective of this paper is to shed some empirical light on the price development and price formation for wood fuel used by the Swedish district heating sector. According to Lönner et.al. (1998), there is a significant potential for increasing the use of wood fuel in Sweden, and that at a...

Public procurement is officially regarded as an effective means to secure environmental improvement. Estimates indicate that public authorities within the European Union typically purchase goods and services corresponding to approximately 16 percent of GNP per annum. Hence, it is believed,...

This thesis consists of five papers, four of them basically concerning environmental issues, while the fifth paper addresses the issue of measuring output from the educational sector. <p> The first paper starts from the fact that industrial activity causes environmental damage. Therefore, public...</p>

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a procedure to empirically test the Porter hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that environmental regulation not only increases environmental quality, but also brings the polluting producers information that makes them more resource efficient, as well as...

The purpose of this paper is to compute and evaluate producers’ marginal abatement costs (MACs). These costs are obtained by calculating shadow prices of bad outputs from the production technology, which is represented by the estimated directional output distance function. To be more specific,...

Under the Kyoto Protocol the European Union (EU) agreed to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases by 8 percent in comparison with the level in 1990. The Burden-Sharing Agreement (BSA) further redistributes the overall 8 percent reduction target among the EU Member States. The purpose of this...

The Swedish health care system is to a large extent publicly managed by 21 local county councils. During recent years there has been a movement were local county councils have opted to allow more of the production to be performed by alternative producers (i.e. private firms, cooperatives etc.)....

Estimates by the European Commission indicate that public authorities within the European Union typically purchase goods and services corresponding to approximately 16 percent of GDP per annum. Hence, it is believed, private firms can be stimulated to invest in less polluting production...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature connected to the so called Porter Hypothesis. That is, to review the literature connected to the discussion about the relation between environmental policy and competitiveness. According to the conventional wisdom environmental policy,...