Although an extensive literature has grown up around the relationship between tariffs and growth, the conclusions are often contradictory and panel data techniques make it difficult to test for causal relationships and to account for the heterogeneity there must have been between the experiences of individual countries. We suggest that much can be learned by using time serie...

For a variety of reasons it can be argued that the share of electricity generated from renewable energy sources should be increased. However, many of the new renewable energy technologies cannot yet successfully compete against conventional ones, and therefore support schemes are needed. A common approach, at least within the European Union, is the provision of guaranteed feed-in tariffs. More ...

Electricity Real Time Pricing (RTP) tariffs inter alia have Demand Side Management (DSM) as a main aim. Customers are billed according to hourly fluctuating energy prices. Essentially RTP pricing signals can be seen as control inputs to change customer load usage. It is suggested that optimised pricing signals sent to RTP customers can lead to a much more efficient DSM initiative. This paper de...

This article demonstrates the relationship between the utility function's parameters which represent consumer's taste and the reservation price. We describe the changes in the reservation price analytically and supplement the geometrical illustrations by economic interpretations. We formulate the monopolist’s problem of setting the price of a capital good and the price of a service that the cap...

Grid computing has been identified as an instrument to fulfil high computational demand, a promising approach for higher resource utilization, and an instrument for cost reduction. The full potential of cost savings can be tapped when incentives are set such that demand is shifted to periods or hardware with lower demand, thereby flattening the demand. To set such incentives, it is mandatory to...

One of the steps called for in the fight against malaria is the removal of tariffs and taxes on insecticide-treated bednets (ITNs), netting materials, and insecticides, with a view to reducing the retail prices of ITNs and thus increasing utilization. In this paper we develop an approach for analysing the extent to which reform of tariff and tax policy can be expected to increase ITN purchases....

Various electricity reforms have been adopted by a number of countries within the last 2 decades. Turkey, as one of those countries, has restructured its electricity market and intensively privatized the distribution companies. As one of the main targets of the liberalization efforts in the sector was announced to be reduced consumer prices, it is a matter of interest to look at the related dev...

With the transition from a flat rate dominated pricing regime towards volume-based tariffs, bandwidth is often bundled with specific allowances or overuse-charges for data consumption. One central element in many new telecommunications tariffs is the implementation of data caps, which are a common tool to address several challenges telecommunications providers face in today’s markets. In this c...

In the 1980’s and 1990’s many African countries liberalised their trade policy, although since the mid 1990s there are countries that did not alter tariffs. This allows us to analyse the effects of trade liberalisation on the change in imports using Difference-inDifferences techniques that allow us to evaluate the impact on imports of trade liberalisation at the general and sector-specific leve...

Very few issues are more contentious today than the effects of trade policy on the rate of economic growth and poverty in developing countries. The paper investigates the relationship between trade barriers and growth using a dynamic panel regression model for data on 48 developing countries over 1980-1999. Trade barriers are captured by measures of tariffs, import and export taxes. Particular ...