Prefabrication makes shipbuilding competitive

At the beginning of February the Hamburg shipyard, Blohm & Voss, introduced the public to a new technical concept which may mean a revolution in shipbuilding: the “Pioneer”-multi-carrier. This design is composed of prefabricated elements. It is based on the mechanical assembly technique and more than one hundred variations are available. INTERECONOMICS asked two representatives of this shipyard about the economic advantages of this new system and what effects it will have upon the shipbuilding industry.     

Environmental Health Risks and Tradable Health Risk Permits

Health risk permits are suggested as an instrument for the systematic management of all health-relevant pollutants. These permits are denominated in statistical deaths due to pollution and have to be acquired by firms which emit pollutants inimical to health. They have two advantages: First, they guarantee that a clear decision about the acceptable number of statistical deaths due to pollution is made. Second, health risk permits are able to realize any level of health risk thus chosen in an efficient way. However, in practice some compromises have to be made: The health risk function relating emissions to health risk must employ some simplifying assumptions and complementary regulation is needed to make health risk permits feasible and acceptable. Furthermore, there are other aims of environmental policy besides the preservation of human health, such as climate control and conservation, for which health risk permits are of no use.     

Combining time-series and econometric forecast of tourism activity

It has always been difficult to model the travel industry because tourism involves such a diverse set of activities. However, various regional decision makers have become increasingly interested in predicting the flows of visitors through their market. Accurate forecasts of the number of tourists' arrivals, their length of stay, and their expenditures improve planning and inventory control. Stochastic time-series models have compared favorably with econometric models at the aggregate level while some naive automatic forecasting tools have fared well in comparison when predicting industry-level behavior. Several approaches have been developed to improve forecast accuracy. This paper presents parsimonious methods of improving accuracy by combining various forecasting techniques. The Box-Jenkins stochastic time-series method is combined with a traditional econometric technique to forecast airline visitors to the State of Florida.     

The Optimal Decentralisation of Government Activity: Normative Recommendations for the European Constitution

This article surveys the research on the efficient assignment of policy tasks to different levels of government and applies the results on the delimitation of competencies within the EU. A precise derivation of an optimal degree of decentralisation is not possible on purely theoretical grounds, it has to be determined case-by-case. Systematic evidence on direct relationships between economic performance and fiscal decentralisation is both scarce and ambiguous. Comparing the actual and prospective delimitation of EU-competencies with the normative recommendations, remarkable discrepancies arise in the fields of agriculture and defence. The establishment of a flexible assignment scheme is an undeniable necessity in order to guarantee reversibility and to cope efficiently with changing conditions. In this respect, the European Convention has delivered insufficient results in its final draft Treaty as of July 2003.     

Einige neuere Probleme und Aspekte der Fiskalpolitik

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