Over the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa's competitiveness is adversely affected by: (i) poor regional...

This paper uses qualitative and comparative analysis to reveal two important findings. First, in France, if the aim of reform announced by the Minister is to re-build the SNCF's monopoly, our fear is that, instead of stimulating French railways, this will cause a downward slide in the sector by...

Despite the pervasive nature of land use planning and land use regulation, evaluation of the costs and benefits of these policies has received only limited attention. This paper presents an empirical methodology, based on clear microeconomic foundations, for the evaluation of benefits and costs...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables...

After many years of an impasse in attempts to introduce Regulatory Impact Assessment to Greece the Greek Prime Minister announced in July of 2006 the introduction of a very ambitious Integrated Impact Assessment on the economy, the society and the environment. The model presented was at the same...

The Danish water regulator uses, among other things, Data Envelopment Analysis to create a pseudo-competitive environment for the water companies. The benchmarking results are used to set an individual revenue cap for each company. The benchmarking model is currently criticized for not including...

Researchers and practitioners who use Data Envelopment Analysis often want to incorporate several inputs and outputs in their model to consider as much relevant information as possible. However, too many inputs and outputs can result in the well-known dimensionality problem referred to as the...

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The...

The role of product market reforms in achieving the objective of higher employment and growth has recently received much attention amongst academics. The aim of this paper is to analyse some of the channels through which cross-market effects come about and to assess their policy relevance. The...

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is often used by regulators to create a pseudo-competitive environment for sectors with natural monopolies. In addition to develop a theoretically well-behaved model, regulators need to take into account several other factors, such as the political agenda and the...