Benchmarking by means of applying the DEA model is appearing as an interesting alternative for regulators under the new regimes for electricity distributors. A sample of large electricity distribution utilities from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands for the year 1997 is...

Sound increases in agricultural productivity and incomes have been from the very begining two of the main goals of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Economic Community (now European Union - EU). The paper tries to evaluate, through the estimation of convergence coefficients, if the...

Globalization, defined in economic terms as the phenomenon of increased integration of the world economy, generates strong reactions due to some negative effects of the growth of international trade, the internationalization of industrial production, and unrestricted cross-border capital flows,...

Policy recommendations concerning optimal scale of production units often have serious implications for the restructuring of a sector, while tests of natural monopoly have important implications for regulatory structure. The piecewise linear frontier production function framework is becoming the...

The intention in this article is to consider some basic questions of transition after the more than ten years that have elapsed since this process has started, and after the emergence of a huge literature which tries to explain it. The structure of the article is as it follows: Part I is about a...

In this paper we discuss a general framework for analyzing labor supply behavior in the presence of complicated budget- and quantity constraints of which some may be unobservable. The point of departure is that an individual's labor supply decision can be considered as a choice from a set of...

Institutional restructuring in West Germany and Eastern Europe is a consequence of the failure of two major socialist experiments, National Socialism and Marxism-Leninism. The paper addresses a number of issues such as: Why was the transition of West Germany in the 1950s more successful than the...

The asymptotics of large deviation probabilities for two-sample non degenerate von Mises functionals and U- statistics of arbitrary degree is investigated. We find explicitly the main term of this asymptotics. Some examples motivated by nonparametric statistics are given. The result may be...

Criminal investigation and prosecution of politicians, top civil servants and other public figures are topics frequently discussed in the media. The nature of the investigating or prosecuting authority varies between countries – from the general public prosecutor, through magistrates to...

We compare various kinds of independence tests on samples with random size, in order to provide practitioners with some guidance for their choice based on approximate Bahadur efficiency. Such results are obtained for a wide class of distributions of random index; the efficiency slopes of the...