This paper estimates the dose-response relationship between air pollution and the number of work loss days for the Netherlands. The study is based on illness data (work loss days) for the Dutch labour population and average year concentrations of air pollution in 29 districts. The dose-response...

This article deals with the determination of the opportunity costs of government projects. In the past, authors such as S. A. Marglin and M. S. Feldstein developed fromulae for opportunity costs, starting (implicitly) from a particular variant of a neoclassical model. In the article, it is...

In the European Union (EU) the discussions on climate policy have focused on the instrument of taxation. However, there has been considerable opposition from both Member States and industry against the combined carbodenergy tax proposals. In this article, an alternative market-oriented...

Usually public monopoly firms have the task of providing services while covering costs with the revenue from charges paid by users. From the literature it is known that if users take the charge as given, the zero-profit constraint of the public firm results in an inefficient allocation of...

In the subsidised housing sector, building corporations can use their market power as purchasers to raise output of subsidised housing to a level higher than it is with perfect competition on both sides of the market. This holds true if the building society is perfectly X-efficient. The...

The paper discusses efficiency issues in the public provision of environmental services, in particular waste water treatment. It is shown that in the face of increasing, respectively decreasing returns to scale the zero profit constraint of a cost minimizing public firm induces underinvestment,...

Environmental resources and human knowledge are the ultimate foundations on which human welfare is based. The impact of technical knowledge is well researched. Denison, for example, attributes no less than 47 per cent of the growth of real GNP in the USA over the period 1948–81 to technical...