The shadow wage is the social opportunity cost of labor. After reviewing earlier theoretical and empirical literature, we define four labor market conditions: fairly socially efficient (FSE), quasi-Keynesian unemployment (QKU), urban labor dualism (ULD) and rural labor dualism (RLD). We offer,...

Ageing populations require larger healthcare facilities, in spite of growing public budget constraints, inducing to wonder whether we can afford what we increasingly need, accompanying sustainable and careful demography.New healthcare infrastructural investments, compliant with Eurostat rules,...

Nearly all discussions about the appropriate consumption discount rate for climate change policy evaluation assume that a single discount rate concept applies. We argue that two distinct concepts and associated rates apply. We distinguish between a social-welfare-equivalent discount rate...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Through this paper the author discusses the phenomenon of excessive Government borrowing and the factors that lead Governments to be so dependent on financial markets. It is argued that the combined effect of unregulated financial intermediaries, hedge funds and Credit Rating Agencies in...

Following the extra ordinary decision to bail in the unsecured depositors and restructure the two main banks and the near complete destruction of the country's economic business model as an International Financial Centre, the author considers the changes necessary to rebuild the economy of...

The author discusses how different organizational structures may facilitate or impede innovation. During the various stages in the innovation processes an organisation should adapt or change its structure to enable creativity and research to take place by being more flexible and shift to a more...

This paper demonstrates what kind of cost-benefit measure should be used for evaluation of local public policies involving migration. Luenberger (1992), extending “distributable surplus” presented by Allais (1981), formally introduced the so-called social benefit function that cardinally...

Many investments involve both a long time-horizon and risky returns. Making investment decisions thus requires assumptions about time and risk preferences. In the public sector in particular, such assumptions are frequently contested and there is no immediate prospect of universal agreement....

Conventional benefit-cost analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal. Among the assumptions this entails is that the policy or project is small, so the underlying growth rate of the economy does not change. However, this...