Large amounts of e-waste are processed "informally" in lower income countries. Such processing releases dangerous pollutants, which increase mortality and reduce cognitive functioning. This paper estimates the social cost of informal e-waste processing in Southern China. This parameter may be...

Social cost functions in humanitarian operations are defined as the sum of logistics and deprivation costs. They are widely regarded as appropriate objective functions, even though the way they were introduced requires cautiously formulated deprivation cost functions for the analyzed goods and...

During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" - because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others - and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...