As the first step in the general reform of local government finance in Great Britain, domestic rates in Scotland were replaced by the community charge or poll tax with effect from 1st April, 1989. At the same time Scottish households faced a rise in their local tax bills from an average of £399...

Bulgaria, like other socialist economies in transition, is attempting to implement an ambitious programme which combines a price reform to reduce price distortions and to liberalize pricing mechanisms, with macroeconomic stabilization to reduce the budget deficit and lower the underlying rate of...

Econometricians have begun to devote more attention to spatial interactions when carrying out applied econometric studies. In part, this is motivated by an explicit focus on spatial interactions in policy formulation or market behavior, but it may also reflect concern about the role of omitted...

This paper argues that a substantial portion of the risks associated with the defined benefit (DB) pension schemes operated by regulated utilities in the UK will, in practice, fall on customers via the tariffs that they pay for regulated goods and services. It examines the assumptions made by...

Econometricians have begun to devote more attention to spatial interactions when carrying out applied econometric studies. The new command we are presenting, xsmle, fits fixed- and random-effects spatial models for balanced panel data for a wide range of specifications: the spatial...

This paper presents xsmle, a new Stata command for the estimation of spatial panel-data models. xsmle fits a spatial autoregressive model, a spatial error model, and a spatial Durbin model with fixed or random effects and with or without a dynamic component. Moreover, xsmle estimates the...

Lack of access to safe drinking water remains a present concern in many developing countries, particularly in rural locations. Membrane water treatment technologies have the potential to remove microbiological and chemical contaminants reliably and simultaneously from a wide range of water...

Widespread concern has been expressed that the costs of reducing environmental pollution in Eastern Europe will divert substantial investment resources from the pool available for industrial modernization. In fact, apart from a number of severely damaged areas, the general level of exposure to...