Trends in protectionism: Anti-dumping and trade related investment measures

The importance of non-tariff barriers in restricting free trade has risen during recent years. Due to their selectivity non-tariff barriers may distort trade even more significantly than tariffs. Developing countries and economies in transition are often most negatively affected.     

A methodology for determining public investment criteria

Cost-benefit analysis is a popular method of evaluating both public and private investments. This paper explores the theoretical basis of cost-benefit analysis, the methodology of its application and the policy ramifications arising from its application in terms of public investments. The discussion presented in this paper is relevant to public investments undertaken at all levels of government. A main conclusion of this paper is that the social conscience of the planner or decision-maker and his knowledge of the benefits and shortcomings of cost-benefit analysis are key factors in successfully implementing public investments.     

On the non-existence of oligopolistic equilibria in differentiated products spaces

In a large class of product differentiation models á la Hotelling, the firms' payoffs in the game involving location in the differentiated products space exclusively depends on the distance to their neighbouring firms, rather than on the firms' locations proper. This leads to a degeneracy on the firms' strategy space. Using alternative equilibrium concepts, this is shown to be the reason for the non-existence of non-cooperative equilibria, especially if the firms' technologies are not identical.     

Capitalization of Farm Policy Benefits and the Rate of Return to Policy-Created Assets: Evidence from California Dairy Quota

The rate of return to ownership of California dairy quota is about 27% per year—well above that of typical financial assets, but in line with other measured returns to agricultural quotas. Ownership of dairy quota does not contribute positively to total variation of typical portfolios, including those of dairy farm assets, and so contributes little or no portfolio risk. A plausible alternative hypothesis for the high rate of return is that quota owners see significant risk of policy change that would reduce future quota values. That is, they face default risk in quota ownership.     

A further note on arrow's impossibility theorem

For arbitrary measure spaces of agents we investigate the existence of social welfare functions which fulfill a suitable non-dictatorship axiom; it turns out that there is an essential difference between finite and σ-finite but infinite measure spaces. Furthermore the condition of universal domain of social welfare functions is weakened.     

Approximating Large Diversified Portfolios

This paper considers a financial market with asset price dynamics modeled by a system of lognormal stochastic differential equations. A one‐dimensional stochastic differential equation for the approximate evolution of a large diversified portfolio formed by these assets is derived. This identifies the asymptotic dynamics of the portfolio as being a lognormal diffusion. Consequentially an efficient way for computing probabilities, derivative prices, and other quantities for the portfolio are obtained. Additionally, the asymptotic strong and weak orders of convergence with respect to the number of assets in the portfolio are determined.     

Assessing housing management in terms of development objectives

This article reports on a research project aimed at assessing whether a particular management process of housing delivery correlates with an improvement or reduction in the state of development of housing recipients. The construct ‘state of development’ refers to the extent to which recipients have the capacity and power to deal with the challenges of a dynamic environment and utilise its opportunities in a responsible and sustainable manner. ‘Housing management’ refers to the execution of management functions to process housing inputs into outputs. The authors explored the correlation between these two variables in a case study involving the Delft housing project in Cape Town. They measured indicators using questionnaires, an analysis of project data, and by observing and evaluating the environments of experimental group members. The results indicated that the extent of the appropriateness of housing management caused a corresponding change in the state of development of housing recipients.