Returns on public capital investment - procurement, whole life cost and value in English schools and hospitals from 1997 - 2012

The UK government has for many decades assumed the role of provider for a range of public services (and the assets that underpin them) considered essential to the functioning of society. Education and healthcare in England have remained almost entirely publicly funded under the administration and management of central government departments and local authorities. The need to maintain and invest in the public service assets (PSAs) that support delivery remains, regardless of whether their ownership is public or private. The business cases for investment involve social cost benefit analysis assessed against the budgetary constraints of fiscal affordability. This thesis attempts to identify the information used, and ideally required, to make decisions to invest in building schools and hospitals. The role of procurement method is considered alongside the forms of capital work (refurbishment / new build) in recent capital programmes for schools and hospitals. Theoretical frameworks for analysis of the efficacy of capital investment are drawn from the whole life cost (WLC) literature and discourses on decision making under uncertainty, contract theory and transaction cost economics. New methodological contributions on the valuation of whole life cost returns, including those from improved outcomes in the form of educational attainment in schools, are presented in later analysis chapters. Key findings include: 1) the estimated whole life cost ratio of 1 (construction) to 0.5 (operation) to 5 (staffing) for schools over a 60 year life discounted at 3.5% and, 2) a lack of association in improved educational attainment following capital investment. Further, findings suggest that given the durable nature of PSAs, along with the long time periods over which benefits accrue, there is considerable difficulty in appraising the returns to (and value of) capital investment in PSAs. Recommendations focus on the need for better co-ordination of government data on capital programmes and projects, on-going costs of operation and the outcomes of PSA users to better inform investment appraisal and programme design

Inflation Persistence and the Taylor Principle

Although the persistence of inflation is a central concern of macroeconomics, there is no consensus regarding whether or not inflation is stationary or has a unit root. We show that, in the context of a “textbook” macroeconomic model, inflation is stationary if and only if the Taylor rule obeys the Taylor principle, so that the real interest rate is increased when inflation rises above the target inflation rate. We estimate Markov switching models for both inflation and real-time forward looking Taylor rules. Inflation appears to have a unit root for most of the 1967 – 1981 period, and is stationary before 1967 and after 1981. We find that the Fed’s response to inflation is also regime dependent, with both the pre and post-Volcker samples containing monetary regimes where the Fed both did and did not follow the Taylor principle. This contrasts to recent research that suggests the Fed’s response to inflation has been time invariant, and that changes in monetary policy only occurred with respect to the output gap.Taylor rule, real-time data, Great inflation, policy regimes, Markov switching

Infrastructure bottlenecks, private provision, and industrial productivity : a study of Indonesian and Thai cities

This research project followed an earlier similar project on Nigeria, applying the same methods. A sample of manufacturers was surveyed to document their responses to infrastructure deficiencies in electricity, water, transport, telecommunications, and waste disposal. They found the manufacturers undertook significant expenditures to offset deficiencies in publicly provided infrastructure services, and that changing public policy toward privately supplied infrastructure and changing the pricing of public infrastructure could yield significant savings in social costs. Thailand and Indonesia have made significant strides in following the policies for private sector participation in infrastructure provision. Nigeria, where public infrastructure monopolies still dominate, lags behind, yet stands to benefit most from such policy reform. Government policy toward the industrial organization and pricing of infrastructure sectors can significantly help a developing economy realize the benefits of private sector participation in the provision of infrastructure services.Banks&Banking Reform,Decentralization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Urban Services to the Poor,Urban Services to the Poor,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Patching task-level robot controllers based on a local µ-calculus formula

We present a method for mending strategies for GR(1) specifications. Given the addition or removal of edges from the game graph describing a problem (essentially transition rules in a GR(1) specification), we apply a µ-calculus formula to a neighborhood of states to obtain a “local strategy” that navigates around the invalidated parts of an original synthesized strategy. Our method may thus avoid global resynthesis while recovering correctness with respect to the new specification. We illustrate the results both in simulation and on physical hardware for a planar robot surveillance task

Comparative approaches for assessing access to alcohol outlets: exploring the utility of a gravity potential approach.

BackgroundA growing body of research recommends controlling alcohol availability to reduce harm. Various common approaches, however, provide dramatically different pictures of the physical availability of alcohol. This limits our understanding of the distribution of alcohol access, the causes and consequences of this distribution, and how best to reduce harm. The aim of this study is to introduce both a gravity potential measure of access to alcohol outlets, comparing its strengths and weaknesses to other popular approaches, and an empirically-derived taxonomy of neighborhoods based on the type of alcohol access they exhibit.MethodsWe obtained geospatial data on Seattle, including the location of 2402 alcohol outlets, United States Census Bureau estimates on 567 block groups, and a comprehensive street network. We used exploratory spatial data analysis and employed a measure of inter-rater agreement to capture differences in our taxonomy of alcohol availability measures.ResultsSignificant statistical and spatial variability exists between measures of alcohol access, and these differences have meaningful practical implications. In particular, standard measures of outlet density (e.g., spatial, per capita, roadway miles) can lead to biased estimates of physical availability that over-emphasize the influence of the control variables. Employing a gravity potential approach provides a more balanced, geographically-sensitive measure of access to alcohol outlets.ConclusionsAccurately measuring the physical availability of alcohol is critical for understanding the causes and consequences of its distribution and for developing effective evidence-based policy to manage the alcohol outlet licensing process. A gravity potential model provides a superior measure of alcohol access, and the alcohol access-based taxonomy a helpful evidence-based heuristic for scholars and local policymakers

Why manufacturing firms produce some electricity internally

Many manufacturers in developing countries produce their own electricity because the public supply is unavailable or unreliable. The authors develop a model of the firm in which electricity is produced internally, with scale economies. The model explains the observed behavior (prevalent in Nigeria, common in Indonesia, and rare in Thailand) that firms supplement their purchases of publicly produced electricity with electricity produced internally. To prepare an econometric estimate, they specify a translog model. In Nigeria, where firms exhibit excess capacity, generators are treated as a fixed input, whereas in Indonesia, where firms are expanding, they are variable. They confirm strong scale economies in internal power production in both Nigeria and Indonesia. Shadow price analysis for both countries shows that smaller firms would pay much more for public power than larger firms would. Instead of giving quantity discounts, public monopolies should charge the larger firms more and the smaller firms less than they presently charge. In Nigeria, the large firms would make intensive use of their idle generating capacity, while in Indonesia their would expand their facilities. In both countries, small users would realize savings by having to rely less on expensive endogenous power.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Energy Technology&Transmission,Markets and Market Access,Energy Technology&Transmission,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Carbon Policy and Trading,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research

A virtually 2-step nilpotent group with polynomial geodesic growth

A direct consequence of Gromov's theorem is that if a group has polynomial geodesic growth with respect to some finite generating set then it is virtually nilpotent. However, until now the only examples known were virtually abelian. In this note we furnish an example of a virtually 2-step nilpotent group having polynomial geodesic growth with respect to a certain finite generating set.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figur