First published in 1977, this is an applied economics text, in which the basic theory of any introductory economics couurse is applied to a whole range of UK macro- and micro-economic policy issues. The book is designed specifically for first and second year university students, with the aim of demonstrating the relevance of theory to policy, how theory can be applied to policy problems and, in the process, to improve their understanding of the theory itself.

The economic analysis of tobacco consumption is a complex and challenging issue, which entails addressing many different questions: What is the economic burden of smoking and do smokers pay their way'?How do individuals perceive their own health risks?What is the effect of the addictive properties of nicotine on the behavior of a rational, utility-maximizing individual? What is the most effective way to discourage tobacco consumption? In this context, the assessment of the social burden of smoking using a cost-of-illness framework has played a central role since the beginning of the 1970s. Interest in this type of study has grown even more in the wake of the lawsuits brought by American states against the tobacco companies with the aim of recovering excessive medical costs resulting from smoking-related diseases. Economists argue that there is no need for government intervention on condition that smokers receive accurate information about the health hazards - including the risk of addiction - and that they bear all the costs of smoking themselves. Economists agree on this last point: smokers bear most if not all of the economic costs of tobacco consumption. Moreover, a better understanding of the determinants of smoking and of the public perception of the risks of smoking could help decision-makers to improve the design of tobacco control policies.The purpose of Valuing the Cost of Smoking is to review the various methods used to value the adverse health outcomes of smoking, from the standard human capital approach to the new preference-based methods with which intangibles can be assessed. This volume should also help understand better the behavior of smokers as well as the factors thatdetermine the demand for cigarettes. Finally, the volume contains a review of the scientific evidence regarding the effectiveness of taxes in reducing tobacco use.

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

Japan's economy is invariably seen as a prime example of a capitalist system, and a consideration of the elements upon which the Japanese economy is founded seems to lead inexorably to the conclusion that Japan is an established member of the group of highly developed capitalist nations. Yet a country's internal mechanisms can differ markedly from the system as perceived externally. Although not yet widely recognized, a new kind of economic system has developed in Japan, a system that differs greatly from traditional capitalism. The author of this book has observed Japanese industry from the inside. He provides detailed explanations of the unique features of the new corporate system and how it differs from the system of orthodox capitalistic corporations.

Applied Industrial Organization offers a perspective on the richness of empirical industrial organization studies. Some papers derive empirical implications from theoretical models, but other papers start from empirical evidence and construct a theory. Three major topics are explored: the role of innovation, the evolution of market structure and firms, and the determinations of performance. As the central force of market economies, innovation is the essence of competition and results in changes to market structures. Other forces driving the evolution of markets and firms are also analyzed. Finally, the determinants of profitability are investigated. In particular, characteristics such as price flexibility, successful lenders and monopoly regulation are examined. Contributors include F.M. Scherer, Paul Geroski, John Hey, David Audretsch, Manfred Neumann, among others.

This book is a seminal contribution to decision making theory through its study of management decision making in six Beijing state enterprises during the period 1985 to 1989, when the government adopted decentralization as the key to reforming state industries. Through interviews, document surveys and analysis, the author provides a unique insight into not only the changes, but also the complex relations among managers, the Communist Party organization and planning authorities. Readers will gain a richer understanding of Chinese management issues and society.

Industrial Price, Quantity, and Productivity Indices: The Micro-Economic Theory and an Application gives a comprehensive account of the micro-economic foundations of industrial price, quantity, and productivity indices. The various results available from the literature have been brought together into a consistent framework, based upon modern duality theory. This integration also made it possible to generalize several of these results. Thus, this book will be an important resource for theoretically as well as empirically-oriented researchers who seek to analyse economic problems with the help of index numbers. Although this book's emphasis is on micro-economic theory, it is also intended as a practical guide. A full chapter is therefore devoted to an empirical application. Three different approaches are pursued: a straightforward empirical approach, a non-parametric estimation approach, and a parametric estimation approach. As well as illustrating some of the more important concepts explored in this book, and showing to what extent different computational approaches lead to different outcomes for the same measures, this chapter also makes a powerful case for the use of enterprise micro-data in economic research.

Successive governments have promised to reduce business red tape, whilst doing nothing about it. In fact, with regard to the tax system, ever-greater numbers of taxes and ever-greater complexity have increased burdens on business. This trend has been exacerbated by the tendency of governments to offload their costs on to businesses by turning firms into unpaid tax collectors. Research into the costs of regulation is notoriously difficult. However, this study brings together the best work on the burden of tax compliance and administration and adds important new insights. In particular, this monograph shows the severely regressive nature of the costs of complying with the UK tax system - small firms suffer far more than large firms from the imposition of government bureaucracy related to tax collection. The costs of complying with the tax system are higher in the UK than in many other countries. The authors show that this should not be the case, and propose ways of reducing the burden of tax bureaucracy. These include radical reforms, not just to the administration of the tax system, but also to the nature of the system itself.

BE 2002 is the second in a series of conferences on eCommerce, eBusiness, and eGovemment organised by the three IFIP committees TC6, TC8, and TCll. As BE 2001 did last year in Zurich, BE 2002 continues to provide a forum for users, engineers, and researchers from academia, industry and government to present their latest findings in eCommerce, eBusiness, and eGovernment applications and the underlying technologies which support those applications. This year's conference comprises a main track with sessions on eGovernment, Trust, eMarkets, Fraud and Security, eBusiness (both B2B and B2C), the Design of systems, eLearning, Public and Health Systems, Web Design, and the Applications of and Procedures for eCommerce and eBusiness, as well as two associated Workshops (not included in these proceedings): eBusiness Models in the Digital Online Music and Online News Sectors; and eBusiness Standardisation - Challenges and Solutions for the Networked Economy. The 47 papers accepted for presentation in these sessions and published in this book of proceedings were selected from 80 submissions. They were rigorously reviewed (all papers were double-blind refereed) before being selected by the International Programme Committee. This rejection rate of almost 50% indicates just how seriously the Committee took its quality control activities.

In macrodynamics and business cycle analysis we find nowadays a variety of approaches elaborating frameworks for studying the fluctuations in economic and financial data. These approaches are viewed from Keynesian, monetarist and rational expectations standpoints. There are now also numerous empirical methods for the testing of nonlinear data generating mechanisms. This volume brings together a selection of contributions on theories of the business cycle and new empirical methods and synopsizes the new results. The volume (i) gives an overview of current models and modern concepts and tools for analyzing the business cycle; (ii) demonstrates, where possible, the relation of those models to the history of business cycle analysis; and (iii) presents current work, surveys and original work, on new empirical methods of studying cycle generating mechanisms.

This important survey, first published in 1981, presents some different and often contending perceptions of the problem of surplus capacity as it re-emerged in the world of the 1980s an economic climate with many parallels to the current era. Susan Strange and Roger Tooze deliberately assembled writers of many different nationalities, professional backgrounds and ideological convictions and asked them to make the case for their version of the problem. Some even doubt if there really is much of a problem at all. Others see it as fundamentally political, or monetary; as inherent in the capitalist system, or as the product of short-sighted pressure groups and perverse politicians. To help readers judge for themselves, there are specialist contributions on surplus capacity as it has shown up in different sectors of the world economy shipbuilding, textiles, steel, petrochemicals, insurance and banking and on the responses of different actors in the international system, including the European Community and multinational corporations.

Hospital Cost Analysis provides an overview of theoretical developments in the economic analysis of production and costs in the multiproduct firm, and discusses these developments. Following a lucid explanation of the concepts of jointness, input/output separability and returns to scale, a detailed discussion of the concept measurement and classification of hospital output is provided. A fundamental dilemma confronting economists interested in estimating hospital cost functions is highlighted, viz. the trade-off between flexibility in functional form and homogeneity within hospital output categories. Empirical results on the effects of case mix, scale and utilisation, public/private ownership, and the centralised administration of hospital systems on hospital costs are presented. The implications of hospital cost analysis for public policy with respect to hospital payment schemes, including schemes based on Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs), are also considered. This book brings together the literature on hospital cost analysis with theoretical developments in the analysis of the multiproduct cost functions. It will be of considerable interest to teachers and students of health economics and health policy advisers interested in the determinants of hospital costs and the design of hospital payment schemes.

A central concern of economics is how society allocates its resources. Modern economies rely on two institutions to allocate: markets and governments. But how much of the allocating should be performed by markets and how much by governments? This collection of readings will help students appreciate the power of the market. It supplements theoretical explanations of how markets work with concrete examples, addresses questions about whether markets actually work well and offers evidence that supposed "market failures" are not as serious as claimed.

Featuring readings from Hayek, William Baumol, Harold Demsetz, Daniel Fischel and Edward Lazear, Benjamin Klein and Keith B. Leffler, Stanley J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, and John R. Lott, Jr., this book covers key topics such as:

? Why markets are efficient allocators

? How markets foster economic growth

? Property rights

? How markets choose standards

? Asymmetric Information

? Whether firms abuse their power

? Non-excludable goods

? Monopolies

The selections should be comprehended by undergraduate students who have had an introductory course in economics. This reader can also be used as a supplement for courses in intermediate microeconomics, industrial organization, business and government, law and economics, and public policy.

Your classic advanced microeconomic theory textbook delivering rigorous coverage of modern microeconomics.

This book analyzes the factors behind the poor industrial performance in African countries under structural adjustment policies in the eighties and discusses prospects for recovery and further industrialization in the nineties. The focus is on the African textile sector in a worldwide comparative perspective and Tanzania has been chosen for a detailed case-study. Macro- and microeconomic explanations are given and combined with an analysis of the state. The conclusion is that lack of adequate industrial policy threatens to undermine past industrialization efforts.

This book focuses on the construction of the economic policies of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its institutions. It reviews the faltering economic performance of the EMU countries before and after the onset of the financial crisis. It exposes the shortcomings and design faults of the EMU project on fiscal and monetary policies under the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and now the 'fiscal compact'. It critically examines the labour market agenda of the EMU and argues for avoidance of the neo-liberal employment policies being advocated. It proposes an alternative policy agenda for a sustainable currency union, and asks whether a currency union can be sustained without de facto political union.

Health care arguably is the single most regulated industry in industrial countries, and possibly in newly industrialized and developing countries as well. But what exactly is being regulated, what are the instruments used, and what are the effects and side-effects of such regulation? Regulation of Health: Case Studies of Sweden and Switzerland seeks to resolve problems in answering these key questions regarding the health care sector in two countries - Sweden and Switzerland. The volume contains a series of studies that compare the regulation of health and health care in these two apparently very similar countries, in considerable detail. The contributing teams acquired a great deal of knowledge about health regulation in both countries; they also derived comparative predictions when regulation differs, using actual observations to check whether these predictions are borne out. These comparisons are based on the conditions prevailing in the mid-nineties.

This monograph studies multi-member households or, more generally, socio-economic groups from a purely theoretical perspective and within a general equilibrium framework, in contrast to a sizeable empirical literature. The approach is based on the belief that households, their composition, decisions and behavior within a competitive market economy deserve thorough examination. The authors set out to link the formation, composition, decision-making, and stability of households. They develop general equilibrium models of pure exchange economies in which households can have several, typically heterogeneous members and act as collective decision-making units on the one hand and as competitive market participants on the other hand. Moreover, the more advanced models combine traditional exchange (markets for commodities) and matching (markets for people or partners) and develop implications for welfare, social structures, and economic policy. In the field of family economics, Hans Haller and Hans Gersbach have pioneered a 'market' approach that applies the tools of general equilibrium theory to the analysis of household behavior. This very interesting book presents an overview of their methods and results. This is an inspiring work. Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Columbia University, USA The sophisticated, insightful and challenging analysis presented in this book extends the theory of the multi-person household along an important but relatively neglected dimension, that of general equilibrium theory. It also challenges GE theorists themselves to follow Paul Samuelson in taking seriously the real attributes of that fundamental building block, the household, as a social group whose decisions may not satisfy the standard axioms of individual choice. This synthesis and extension of their earlier work by Gersbach and Haller will prove to be a seminal contribution in its field. Ray Rees, LMU Munich, Germany