The relationship between decentralization and the quality of governments is one of the core issues of decentralization studies. This paper aims to make two contributions to this research. Firstly, we conduct an empirical analysis at the local level, covering 174 regions across the European...

Public sector activities are often neglected in economic approaches to analyze the driving forces of urban growth and changes in urban hierarchies. One crucial aspect of public sector activities is the institutional status of cities as regional capital. The paper is reporting on a quasi natural...

Global climate change is one of the most important and complex problem challenging the world community. The impact of the climate change on the nature and human kind will likely be destructive. Even though the international community is aware of consequences, there is still a lack of political...

After Bonn and Marrakech it is likely that emission trading will be realized in the near future. Major influences on the permit market are the institutional details, the participation structure and the treatment of hot air. Different scenarios do not only differ in their implications for the...

It is widely believed that an environmental tax (price regulation) and cap-and-trade (quantity regulation) are equally efficient in controlling pollution when there is no uncertainty. We show that this is not the case if some consumers (firms, local governments) are morally concerned about...

In the last funding periods there was steady increase in the number of LEADER-regions in Europe, and, at least in Germany, it is already evident that this gain will continue: for the 2014-2020 funding period there around 300 LAGs expected in comparison to 244 LAGs in the last period. For the new...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the long-run efficiency of locally targeted tax incentives in revitalizing distressed areas. We focus on the first generation of the French "Enterprise Zone" (EZ) initiative, implemented in 1997 in continental France. This program provides tax...

There are three parts of our paper. Firstly, it gives an overview about the goals and factors which affect the integration of local communal services. Horizontal integration means joining the various individual service providers, such as water supply and sewage, communal waste, district heating,...

Knowledge of whether, and over what range of output, there are economies or diseconomies of scale in providing local communal services is an important question from theoretical, practical and regional political point of view also. The theoretical side of the question is connected to the...