This book is addressed to water stakeholders, primarily Water Economic Regulators (WERs) and investors. It examines the performance of a selected panel of privately owned utilities in the European water sector with the primary aim of assessing the industry's appeal to private investors. This includes analyzing trends in rates of return, and identifying key drivers such as profitability, rates of return, and financial leverage. Additionally, the report delineates the risk profiles of the se...

This book describes the water sector as it is structured in Italy. The first part describes the legal framework which rules the sector in Italy, its evolution since the last 20 years, and its weaknesses. The second part describes the governance of Italian water utilities, distinguishing full public-owned companies from public-private partnership and private companies. The third part reports insights on water utilities performance to enquire the presence of economies by scope, scale and den...

This book discusses the history of invertebrate fossil understanding and classification by exploring fossil studies between the 15th and 18th centuries. Before the modern age, the understanding of fossil findings went through several phases. The treatment by philologists, philosophers and historians of natural sciences involved religious, sometimes folkloristic, aspects before scientific ones. This work showcases and assesses these original findings by carrying out a bibliographical, and a...

This book gathers the latest advances and innovations in the field of innovative biosystems engineering for sustainable agriculture, forestry and food production, as presented at the International Mid-Term Conference of the Italian Association of Agricultural Engineering (AIIA), held in Padova, Italy, on June 17-19, 2024. Focusing on the challenges of implementing sustainability in various contexts in the fields of biosystems engineering, it shows how the research has addressed the sustain...

Economists insist that recovery is at hand, yet unemployment remains high, real estate values continue to drop, and governments stagger under record deficits. The End of Growth proposes a startling diagnosis: humanity has reached a fundamental turning point in its economic history. The expansionary trajectory of industrial civilization is colliding with non-negotiable, natural limits. Richard Heinberg's latest landmark work goes to the heart of the ongoing financial crisis, explaining how ...

This practical text offers the ideal introduction to the economic techniques used in public health.

Margaret Chan, Director General of the World Health Organization, has stated that "Universal Health Coverage is the single most powerful concept that public health has to offer." In this Series from The Lancet, the first of three papers explores the evidence on the links between expansions in coverage and population health outcomes. The second paper looks at the political and economic dimensions of the transition to universal health coverage, and the third examines nine low-income and lowe...

International policies towards protecting intellectual property rights have seen profound changes over the past two decades. Rules on how to protect patents, copyright, trademarks and other forms of intellectual property have become a standard component of international trade agreements. Most significantly, during the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations (1986-94), members of what is today the World Trade Organization (WTO) concluded the Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Pro...

This book evaluates the history, the present and the future of water markets on 5 continents, beginning with the institutional underpinnings of water markets and factors influencing transaction costs. The book examines markets in seven countries and three different U.S. states, ranging from village-level water markets in Oman to basin wide formal water markets in Australia's Murray-Darling River basin.Introductory chapters on the background of water markets and on transaction costs...

Governments often pursue a variety of economic, social and political objectives through their allocation policies that go beyond the maximization of the net present value of the economic rent. The optimal allocation policy depends on a range of country specific and exogenous factors. Despite the variety of factors influencing optimal design, most countries use similar solutions. In particular, when auctions or administrative procedures are used, most governments opt for simple simultaneous mu...

Effective policy is vital for creating greener economies, new jobs and industries, for securing energy supplies and for protecting the climate and environment. As renewable energy is fundamental to achieving all of these objectives, it too needs the best possible policy to drive it. Feed-in tariffs have proven to deliver the fastest, most cost-effective and inclusive deployment, by allowing anyone to sell renewable energy into the grid and get a long term, guaranteed return for it. This bo...

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.Dranove offers pragmatic remedies, some of them...