The Analysis of Welfare Effects of an Environmental Product Tax: An Application to the Taxation of Car Tyres in Hungary

A sophisticated welfare analysis developed by Morris and Kis (1996) is presented here for the study of the effect of a product charge tax on the car tyre market in Hungary. The analysis is extended and complemented in this paper by, first, using the AIDS model and an algorithm developed by Galarraga and Markandya (2000) to estimate demand elasticities from limited data and, second, including the income effects into the analysis. The latter does not have much impact on the results but the generalisation of the model might be useful for the analysis of different goods where the proportion of income spent on them is more important.     

The Effect of Providing Monetary Information on Energy Savings for Household Appliances: A Field Trial in Spain

Journal of Consumer Policy - Energy labels are one of the most widely used policies in the European Union for increasing the energy efficiency of household appliances. However, their effectiveness...     

Wages,prices, and technology in early Catalan industrialization

Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Barcelona are supplied for the period 1500–1808. Second, the prices of labour and capital are compared and the potential profitability of the adoption of the spinning jenny is analysed. Findings show that although Catalonia was not a high wage economy in the way that Britain was in the second half of the eighteenth century, evidence from the cotton spinning sector confirms the relevance of relative factor prices in the adoption of new technology. Within the booming cotton sector after the 1780s, high wages created strong incentives for the adoption of the labour‐saving spinning jenny.     

The Equivalency Principle for Discounting the Value of Natural Assets: An Application to an Investment Project in the Basque Coast

Making decisions about optimal investments in green infrastructure necessitates setting social discount rates. This paper suggests a practical way for determining the discount rate for projects or programmes in which one of the options is to maintain or restore land to an undeveloped state. We propose an “equivalency principle” to derive a simple rule that sets the discount rate. The rule is based on the premise that the long term value of a piece of undeveloped land ought to be at least the same as the value of an identical piece of land in the vicinity to which permission has been granted for development. We illustrate this principle with various case studies and we apply it to a contentious investment project in the Basque Country associated with the regeneration of a large scale harbour that involves reclaiming undeveloped land that has important ecological values, including for the conservation of a marine ecosystem.