Pervasive environmental spillovers are replacing the now outmoded bees and apple orchards as the economists' examples of external effects. The materials balance approach underlines the generality of residuals as the normal outcome of the throughput of materials in the course of production and...

Economic theory and empirical models suggest that economic instruments should help us to meet environmental goals at lower cost. Practical experience, however, shows that the cost savings of emission trading are smaller than expected and charges usually have had small incentive impacts. This...

The performance of local tax offices of Norway is studied over a three-year period using Data Envelopment Efficiency analysis and calculating Malmquist productivity indices. One input, labour, is used, and six output categories of the main service activities carried out by tax offices are...

Attempts can be found in the DEA literature to identify returns to scale at efficient interior points of the production possibility set on the basis of returns to scale at points of the corresponding reference sets. However, an opposite approach is put forward in this paper, advocating that...