Suchergebnisse

This paper shows that the best practice of American methods for producing iron in 1890 was slightly better than the methods employed in Great Britain. It argues that the difference in technique was not of sufficient magnitude to have any bearing on Britain's "decline" as an industrial power. Profits in America are shown to be quite large, and it is hypothesized that these profits arose because the Americans did not anticipate the growth in the demand for pig iron.

AbstractThis special issue covers several important aspects of China's environmental policy, ranging from evaluation of government programs (biogas and the Sloping Land Conversion Program) that aim directly to enhance the rural environment, to the reform of natural resource sectors (collective and state forest reforms) that set foundations for the sustainable use of natural resources, and to the impacts of urban environmental policies (including urban transportation management and industrial pollution control policy). We provide an overview of the topic and a brief introduction to each of the contributed papers.

Analyses of optimal government capital structure generally follow Bohn (1990) and Barro (1995) in assuming risk neutrality or an exogenous risk premium. These analyses usually conclude that the optimal government capital structure stabilizes tax rates over time and states of nature to the greatest extent possible, something known as "tax smoothing." In this paper, we show that when an endogenous risk premium is introduced, the optimal government capital structure will no longer smooth tax rates. Under likely conditions, the optimal structure requires a larger short position in risky assets than that implied by tax smoothing

California and Sweden are both leaders in green regulations and actions. In both there is a substantial political base for environmental regulation, yet the path to regulation in these two political entities is quite different. California emphasizes command and control regulations while Sweden makes heavy use of taxes. We show that both underlying economic factors and the constraints of the larger systems in which these economies are embedded contribute to their choice of control methods.

The ideal water contract for a heterogeneous population of users is a prioritized right that is fully vested and fully tradable. A set of tradable, prioritized rights contracts will span the same space as the Debreu contingent commodities. Therefore, they lead to a competitive equilibrium that is Pareto optimal. Equal sharing of water shortfalls does not have this property. Existing water policies in Israel and the Disputed Territories are not characterized by an efficient set of water contracts. The system misallocates water over both time and space. Current policies are driven by strategic and ideological objectives. With peace, reform of water policies will become politically feasible. The paper concludes with a proposal for a new water-allocation system.