Subject: The education in mathematics, its failure and costs, and how to redesign this market. The political economy of mathematics education. Method: We do not require statistics to show that mathematics education fails but can look at the math itself. Criticism on mathematics itself can only...

The welfare state was created after 1950 with counterproductive mechanisms and this caused high inflation and high unemployment and stagnating growth by 1970, called stagflation. Since 1970 governments redressed the welfare state but did not succeed in finding workable mechanisms. They rather...

This paper illustrates how trust in management can be consolidated through the order and mode of application of enforcement measures (negotiating and punitive enforcement measures) which are employed in facilitating and maximising compliance with rules. “Whilst negotiating strategies are...

Policy implications of complexity economics (CE) are investigated. CE deals with “Complex Adaptive (Economic) Systems” [CA(E)S], generally characterized by mechanisms and properties such as “emergence” of structure or some capacity of “self-organization”. With this, CE has manifold...

In an industry where regulated firms interact with unregulated suppliers, we investigate the welfare effects of a merger between regulated firms when cost synergies are uncertain before the merger and their realization becomes private information of the merged firm. The optimal merger policy...

Entry of new firms can be difficult or even impossible at capacity constrained facilities, despite the actual cost of entering is low. Using a game theoretic model of incumbent firms’ pricing behaviour under these conditions, it is found that under the assumption of Bertrand competition and...

Augmenting consumer welfare was a key justification behind the reform of utilities from the 1980s. But, three decades later, evidence is mounting that consumer satisfaction with household utilities is quite uneven. Moreover, governments, regulators and international organizations are...

This article posits that there is no a priori reason that industrial upgrading and market expansion leads to greater social protections or better regulation. I ask three questions and attempt a conceptual framework for institutions and their broader spatial evolution. A firm’s regional risk...

The need for effective supervision of capital markets is becoming all the more evident in the aftermath of the recent LIBOR and rate rigging scandals. Financial regulators or indeed bank regulators cannot perform such a function effectively without the involvement of auditors in the supervisory...

In transposing EU Directive 73/2009/CE on natural gas infrastructures into Italy’s national legislation, the country opted for a Independent Transmission Operator (ITO) model instead of full ownership unbundling. ITO allows the essential facility to be controlled by a vertically integrated...