Suchergebnisse

Legislative reforms in Anglo-American countries require governments to account for efficient spectrum usage subject to interference control. New spectrum governance regimes promote flexible and competitive usage but the broadcasting industry remains exempt from reforms, at a significant cost to society. The need to liberalize broadcast spectrum cannot be overstated, but how should we select among alternative deregulatory regimes? In a simple stylized model we formalize the welfare effects of allocating licenses for using bandwidth on broadcast spectrum. We provide optimality conditions for entry, spectrum usage, and congestion levels under different market conditions, which allows us to justify the selection of specific governance arrangements.

Legislative reforms in Anglo-American countries require governments to account for efficient spectrum usage subject to interference control. New spectrum governance regimes promote flexible and competitive usage but the broadcasting industry remains exempt from reforms, at a significant cost to society. The need to liberalize broadcast spectrum cannot be overstated, but how should we select among alternative deregulatory regimes? In a simple stylized model we formalize the welfare effects of allocating licenses for using bandwidth on broadcast spectrum. We provide optimality conditions for entry, spectrum usage, and congestion levels under different market conditions, which allows us to justify the selection of specific governance arrangements.

Each year $250 million is allocated by donor agencies to developing countries for fertility reduction purposes. This article develops an economic optimizing procedure based upon fertility reduction effectiveness ratings on experts in the population field andjudgmental diminishing returns patterns. The model is used to allocate this expenditure over strategies, social settings, and program implementation capabilities to maximize the reduction in births. This allocation is compared with the actual allocation, and the reasons for the disparity are discussed. These reasons relate to the role of efficiency-based benefit-cost analysis in policy decisions.

Scarf's economy has been a vehicle in understanding stability properties in exchange economies. The full set of market equilibria and Pareto optimal allocations for this economy has not been analysed. This paper aims to do that. Firstly, we examine the Pareto optima and we and three different classes. Only Class I exhausts the aggregate endowments of all the goods. Class II and III involve throwing away partially or totally one good in order to achieve Pareto efficiency. Secondly, we explore the price and endowment distribution combinations which sustain the different Pareto Optima as market equilibria. A Pareto optimum which involves throwing away the whole endowment of one of the goods is globally stable.

AbstractIn this paper we test the efficiency of family resource allocation in three-generation households. Understanding how the so-called "squeezed middle" generation allocates resources towards the children and grandparents in the household will be increasingly important as populations age, and more elderly people become dependent upon their relations for financial support. Despite a large literature on household resource allocation in two-generation households (parents and children), to the best of our knowledge ours is the first study that includes the third generation. We present a theoretical model and conduct a discrete choice experiment in the context of reductions in the lifetime risk of developing coronary artery disease to verify the efficient resource allocation hypothesis. The data is obtained from a large sample of the Polish population. The sample consists of the middle generation members of three-generation households and hence WTP represents household value from the perspective of the "squeezed middle" parent. The results imply that household resource allocation is efficient. This has implications for understanding the likely response to government financial support aimed at supporting elderly people and their families.

With the global aid flows stagnating or even decreasing over the next years, the only way to increase the impact of development aid is making the aid more efficient. A widely recognized and applied approach to improve the efficiency of aid is the framework of poverty-efficiency. This thesis analyzes the poverty-efficiency of Official Development Assistance in 2011 using a data from 58 developing countries. The marginal efficiency of the actual allocation is calculated as well as 16 poverty-efficient allocations using three estimates of the aid's impact on growth, four different poverty measures and, in four cases, a small country bias. In order to study whether donor behavior is in line with the principles of poverty-efficiency, a linear model is estimated. The bilateral development assistance of Finland is evaluated as a case study. From the perspective of poverty-efficiency, the inefficiency of the actual allocation of aid is clear. The calculated marginal efficiencies reveal that some aid-receiving countries would greatly benefit from additional aid but some are receiving such high amounts of aid that it actually causes negative effects. When comparing the poverty-efficient allocations to the actual allocation of aid, the latter is clearly not in line with the principles of poverty-efficiency. Almost half of the countries in the data do not receive any aid under the poverty-efficient allocation regardless of the used approach. A number of countries could also be flagged under-funded based on the poverty-efficient allocations. Regarding the case study of Finland, a third of Finland's bilateral aid was not used efficiently from the perspective of poverty-efficiency. The political feasibility of the poverty-efficient allocations is questionable: under the poverty-efficient allocations few populous countries receive very high shares of the global aid budget. In addition, an estimated linear model revealed that donors still prefer smaller countries over ones with a larger population. The calculated marginal efficiencies and poverty-efficient allocations are highly sensitive to aid-growth estimate choices. Hence, in contrast to some current practices, the choice of estimates should be thoroughly examined when using poverty-efficient allocations in practical applications.