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...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model where agents face labor-income and health risks in order to quantify the macroeconomic and welfare consequences of reform options for the German health insurance system. In addition to labor supply, consumption and savings, households also...

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...

Maros-Watampone road passes through a critical geometric conservation area where it is a barrier to the development improvement. Previous studies recommend that three proposed alternative constructions can be used: 1. Elevated Bridge, 2. Cut and Fill, 3. Tunnel system. The Government invited...

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...

Proximity analyses have nowadays turned out to be a part of the toolbox of regional scientists and this notion recently became very popular in the position of politics, and private or public stakeholders. In parallel, the notion of proximity spread in the academic literature and is now commonly...