Discussions of municipal solid waste (MSW) management are influenced increasingly by the concept of the waste hierarchy which, broadly speaking, places landfill as the least acceptable option for dealing with MSW, followed by incineration, recycling, re-use and reduction at source. In this...

Three distinct strands can be identified in the literature on seasonality. Economists have long been interested in removing high-frequency "noise" from individual economic time series, or "deseasonalizing the data" in common parlance. The second strand, on which an extensive technical literature...

In the context of the current debate over standards of public services in Ireland and the appropriate level of public spending this paper reviews historical trends in Irish public expenditure, its relationship to GDP/GNP and comparisons with other EU states. The growth in Irish public spending...

Mixed findings emerge from this ex post Cost-Benefit Analysis of a major water investment programme in Ireland. Water supply and conservation investments, where most benefits were internal, generally proved worthwhile. Wastewater investments could not be analysed fully due to lack of...

Within the economics literature, the ‘psychic costs’ of migration have been incorporated into theoretical models since Sjaastad (J Polit Econ 70:80–93, <CitationRef CitationID="CR43">1962</CitationRef>). However, the existence of such costs has rarely been investigated in empirical papers. In this paper, we look at the psychic costs...</citationref>

A growing literature within economics has sought to examine the impacts of emigration on sending countries. Some of the studies have looked within families and have investigated how emigration affects those family members who are left behind. In this paper, we explore whether older parents of...