A recent strand of the economic literature has emphasised the role of services, and in particular knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), as a primary source of knowledge creation and diffusion. Since this transferring process often occurs through strong face-to-face interactions, the role...

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...

Empirical evidence on economies of scale in healthcare is mostly based on the cost effects of hospital mergers. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper approaches the economies of scale issue by analysing the break-ups of municipal health centre federations. We use the...

The economic dimension of the agricultural farm is intensively studied both by agricultural specialists, who usually want farms as large as possible, but also by agrarian economists who measure the profitability of the factors involved in obtaining agricultural production at the scale of the...

Agricultural public facilities for irrigation and drainage play an important role in Japanese agriculture, especially in paddy production. However, the budget for renovation of old facilities was drastically cut in 2010. For prolonging life time and decreasing lifecycle costs of public...

We study optimal subsidies for renewable energy (RE) generation to internalize external benefits from intertemporal learning-by-doing spillovers, taking into account increasing marginal costs at the industry level due to limited availability of sites suitable for RE. We find that the optimal RE...