Suchergebnisse

This is a conference paper. ; Scarce financial, human and water resources are major constraints on the delivery of sustainable water supplies to the previously disadvantaged rural communities of South Africa. Of these constraints on sustainability, the scarcity of financial resources has received the most attention. During the period from 1994 –2000, the prevailing view in the South African water sector was that some form of cost recovery from the beneficiary communities was necessary to compensate for the scarcity of external funding. Cost recovery became to be seen as so central to sustainability that, in many schemes, it became almost an end in itself. However pronouncements during the local government election of 2000 regarding the provision of "free" water have called into question the appropriateness of cost recovery. This paper will step back from a detailed assessment of specific cost recovery methodologies and focus on the broad objectives and principles underpinning cost recovery on rural water schemes. It will ask whether the pursuit of cost recovery is really worth the cost given the changing political priorities (best illustrated by the recent promise of 6kl of "free" water) and evidence that efficient cost recovery severely reduces household consumption?

Empirical work on price-cost margins often treats costs as exogenous. Allowing for endogenous costs when estimating price-cost margins is the topic of this paper. Methodologically, the endogenous cost model we propose leads to an additional equation that allows for the simultaneity in price setting in the product and the input market (labor in our case). In other words, the usual two-equation set-up (demand and first-order condition in the product market) is generalized to include a third equation, which endogenizes costs. We implement the model using data for eight European airlines from 1976-1994, and show that the treatment of endogenous costs has important implications for the measurement of price-cost margins and the assessment of market power.

Cronyism is a serious problem in the United States, but unfortunately it is still not very well understood. In this new essay, Jay Cost explains what it is, and why we should be so worried about it. By mingling private and public interests, cronyism costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year and threatens to transform our republic into an oligarchy, where the rich dominate the middle class. Worse, modern cronyism has become embedded into the laws themselves, so politicians in Washington assume that such corruption is just the way things should be. To confront the dangers of cronyism, reformers need to think outside the box, paying special attention to how the political process functions