This paper analyzes the growth impact of fiscal and institutional policies for alternative sizes of regions. The local government provides a public input that may be subject to relative congestion thus reducing its individual availability. Then private capital productivity is affected by the number of firms utilizing the governmental input. Institutional policies include the decision about the ...

This Elmhirst lecture first discusses the features of the institutional environment which allow rural people in low income countries to design, plan and implement their own rural development. These are divided into two broad groups: the institutional environment for rural development (environment for the private sector, communities and civil society, local government, and sector institutions) a...

In many situations, it may be more economical to use a used unit than to do a new one. This paper considers an age replacement policy and a periodic replacement policy with minimal repair at failure for a used unit of age x. We discuss optimum replacement policies which minimize the expected cost rates for a specified age x. Further, we obtain an upper bound of an optimum time for an age replac...

We present new prototype tools for optimizing building solar energy impacts in urban regions, to enable better real-time control and policy decisions for energy supply and demand response. The concept is demonstrated with a prototype that estimates the amount of direct sunlight available to building surfaces in complex urban landscapes, taking into consideration local weather predictions (via c...

the future of biomass energy in the global energy system depends on many major factors, among others on the attitude of society in rural areas to the biomass energy and the renewable energy resources. biomass energy plays increasing role in rural areas with its contribution to the self sufficiency of people in the countryside. the paper deals with the analysis the opportunities of utilization o...

although on the basis of geo-economic theories, study of energy-related issues is of strategic importance to all countries, energy resources are no more restricted to oil and gas reserves as was the case during the past century. of course, these resources are still key elements of global energy reserves. today, in addition to geo-politics and geo-economics, the concept of hydro-geopolitics puts...

Island regions and isolated communities represent an understudied area of not only clean energy development but also of innovation. Caribbean states have for some time shown interest in developing a regional sustainable energy policy and in implementing measures which could help to protect its member states from volatile oil markets while promoting reliance on local resources. Here we examine f...

Background Although there is a general agreement on the benefits of evidence informed health policy development given resource constraints especially in Low-Income Countries (LICs), the definition of what evidence is, and what evidence is suitable to guide decision-making is still unclear. Our study is contributing to filling this knowledge gap. We aimed to explore health policy actors’ views r...