services has long been recognized as essential to public health and individual welfare. In most countries government policy has traditionally been to keep water companies in public ownership, and to keep tariffs artificially low through a range of more or less explicit subsidy measures. The results have often been unsatisfactory. Service quality and coverage remain inadequate in many countries,...

The implementation of a CO2 emissions control scheme, either a cap-and-trade program with auctioned permits or a carbon tax, will provide the government with an important new source of revenue. Several economists advocate for the redistribution of this carbon revenue i.e., for the emissions control schemes to be revenue neutral. In this paper, we present an optimization model to obtain redistri...

Millions of Americans live in communities without an adequate supply of affordable housing. The governmental response to the crisis has focused on subsidies to private developers who build below–market housing, with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit at the center of this effort. Although federally funded, the LIHTC program grants states wide latitude in distributing billions of dollars of tax c...

This study examines the financial impacts of electricity subsidy on tubewell owners and water buyers, and proposes alternative subsidy policy options that could balance the efficiency and equity. The results suggest that the subsidy plays a key role in stabilising production by providing financial incentives to tubewell owners to stabilise extraction cost under the declining watertables. The re...

In order to recycle and dispose of all people's expired drugs, the government should design a subsidy policy to stimulate users to return their expired drugs, and drug-stores should take the responsibility of recycling expired drugs, in other words, to be recycling stations. For this purpose it is necessary for the government to select the right recycling stations and treatment stations to opti...

We develop a microeconomic model of endogenous growth where clean and dirty technologies compete in production and innovation– in the sense that research can be directed to either clean or dirty technologies. If dirty technologies are more advanced to start with, the potential transition to clean technology can be diffi cult both because clean research must climb several rungs to catch up with ...

The fisheries sector in sub-Saharan Africa has benefitted from high and increasing amounts of foreign aid for over four decades. In the 1990s when evidence emerged that most stocks were overcapitalized and overfished, the effectiveness of fisheries development aid, particularly those directed at fishing capacity enhancement, came into question. This report examined the relationship between deve...

Eutrophication of the Baltic Sea has in Sweden led to the initiation of government schemes aiming to increase wetland areas in agricultural regions and thereby reduce nutrient transport to the sea. Landowners play a significant role as providers of this ecosystem service and are currently offered subsidies to cover their costs for constructing and maintaining wetlands. We undertook a grounded t...

We develop a microeconomic model of endogenous growth where clean and dirty technologies compete in production and innovation– in the sense that research can be directed to either clean or dirty technologies. If dirty technologies are more advanced to start with, the potential transition to clean technology can be diffi cult both because clean research must climb several rungs to catch up with ...