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>

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 regulation of infrastructure by the ACCC and other economic regulators in Australia is based around net present value estimation techniques. Recently, Monkhouse (2007), suggested that real options valuation would provide better incentives for investment in infrastructure, but did not...

The Europeanisation of public services is frequently considered to have created pressure for Member States to progressively converge towards a new dominant organisational model, based on deregulation, de-integration and privatization. However, while in some sectors (eg. electricity,...

The design and regulation of highway tariffs may be quite different depending upon the objectives pursued by the State. If the aim is to protect consumers, tariffs should be tied to the concessionaire’s profit and revised frequently. Instead, fixing the tariff in advance for the entire period...

This paper examines the economic rationale of the ideas of Gladstone & Chadwick on railway regulation and the legacy of their ideas. In 1844 Gladstone proposed and implemented what we would now call price and quantity regulation whereas in 1859 Chadwick proposed competition "for the field", i.e....

The setting of user prices for enterprises with large fixed costs and marginal costs below average costs – “natural monopolies” – raises important policy questions regarding both efficiency and equity. It has become well accepted among economists that, in a variety of settings, welfare...

Australia’s principal container ports, located in its state capitals, are owned and operated by state authorities that largely return profits from port operations to state governments. Since they govern the volumes of trade in most merchandise, they command immense influence over the openness...

In this paper we analyse the cost structure of a sample of Italian Local Public Transport (LPT) companies operating in large urban centres, so as to extend the evidence of some recent studies focused on small-sized and medium-sized operators. The main focus is to verify the presence and the...