Coordination risk and cost impacts on economic development in poor rural areas

This paper addresses issues relevant to a critical problem in economic development: how to get rapid pro-poor economic growth in poor rural areas in Africa and South Asia where most of the world’s dollar a day poor live. It examines constraints to the development of coordinated exchange systems in poor rural areas, focusing on the core problem of thin markets and low density of economic activity in these areas. Transaction cost and risk analysis is integrated into a conventional neoclassical production economics framework to describe the existence of low level equilibrium traps in transactions and supply chains and to generate important insights for development policy

Outsourcing and structural change: shifting firm and sectoral boundaries

The paper aims at investigating the structural change implications of outsourcing. In trying to bridge the organizational/industrial and the sectoral/structural analysis of outsourcing, it discusses the rational and the methodological pros and cons of a “battery” of outsourcing measurements for structural change analysis. Their functioning is then illustrated through a concise application of them to the OECD area over the ’80s and the early ’90s. A combined used of them emerges as recommendable in checking for the role of outsourcing with respect to that of other structural change determinants

An estimate of the value of lost load for Ireland

This paper estimates the value of short term lost load in the all island electricity market, which includes the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The value of lost load (VoLL) is the average willingness of electricity consumers to pay to avoid an additional period without power. VoLL is also known as the value of security of electricity supply and is inferred using a production function approach. Detailed electricity use data for the Republic of Ireland allows us to estimate the value of lost load by time of day, time of week and type of user. We find that the value of lost load is highest in the residential sector in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Our results can be used to advise policy decisions in the case of supply outages and to encourage optimum supply security. In the context of this study short term is taken to be a matter of hours rather than days or weeks