The Indonesian Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal): Its Role,Development and Future

This paper looks at the setting up and initial growth of the new Indonesian Environmental Impact Management Agency (Bapedal). Coming into being at a crucial time in the development of Indonesia's overall environmental management policy, Bapedal is the first national specialised environmental regulatory body to be established in Indonesia with implementation powers to monitor pollution and the negative impacts of development on the environment. As with any new agency in Indonesia, it has faced some major hurdles in its early development. However its ultimate success as an agency is of crucial importance if Indonesia is going to effectively handle its growing environmental problems over the next decade.     

Advertising and Natural Vacancies in Rental Housing Markets

We formulate a model that explains vacancy durations arising from lags in matches between the suppliers and demanders of housing units. We emphasize rental housing markets in this exposition although the model could be extended to competitive or noncompetitive rental or home-ownership markets. In the case of rental markets, if tenants do not immediately inform landlords upon initiating search for a new unit, landlords are delayed in their search for a new tenant. These matching delays induce a positive natural vacancy rate that cannot be reduced to zero, even in competitive markets. Price-taking landlords are, however, able to affect the resulting vacancy duration through advertising in a Cournot-Nash equilibrium and will, in general, invest in inefficient levels of advertising. As a consequence, there may be a role for public policy to provide incentives that would induce noncooperative landlords to choose the vacancy cost-minimizing advertising solution.     

Leyland Daf: A case of negative European integration

In February 1987 Daf, the privately owned Dutch truck maker, bought the British state-owned Leyland trucks and vans business. Almost five years to the day later, Leyland Daf went into liquidation. This report examines what went wrong and tells the story behind the 1987 deal. It will argue that the UK Government sold Leyland trucks to a parent company which had little to offer. This conclusion raises the crucial issues of how the British Government and the EC got us into this position and why both have done little to solve the regional problems they created.