Strategies to harmonize urbanization and flood risk management in deltas

In many countries, important economic centres and major cities are located in a flood-prone area at the confluence of a large river and the sea. The expansion of these cities increases the risk of major flood disasters, a risk that is further increased if the predicted effects of climate change come true. Recent thinking about flood prevention stresses the importance of restricting city expansions into flood-prone areas, flood-proofing cities and accomodating floods by reserving space for water. These ideas require innovative city design, cooperation between city planners and water managers, and a policy that connects various levels of government with business and the public. The choice of strategy may be culture-specific, but will in any case involve large investments, and have long-term and large-scale consequences. Thus, it is worthwhile to exchange experiences between delta's that are tackling this problem. In the paper we will compare the approaches in a number of "typical" urbanized flood-prone delta's: New Orleans in the Mississippi delta, the Randstad in the Rhine delta, Venice in the Po delta, Wuhan along the Yangtze, Yokohama along the Tsurumi, Dhaka in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and London along the Thames.

Testing Porter's Hypothesis: A Stochastic Frontier Panel Data Analysis of Dutch Horticulture

We propose a test of the Porter hypothesis for the Dutch horticulture sector, using a stochastic production frontier analysis allowing for an inclusion of policy variables to account for the effect of environmental policy of firm performance. We find considerable heterogeneity in the way firms react to environmental policy measures. Our estimation results indicate, for example, that a 1997 voluntary agreement covering energy, nutrient and pesticides use enhances technical efficiency of vegetable and plants growers, contrary to specialised flower growers. Specialised flower growers, however, did react to the 1993 multi-year agreement on energy reduction, contrary to vegetable and plant growers. Summarising, our findings are mixed but do not seem to reject the anecdotal evidence mentioned by Porter and Van der Linde (1995b) that Dutch horticulture firms' performance increased due to increased environmental stringency.firm performance, environmental stringency, technical efficiency, Environmental Economics and Policy, Production Economics, D24, Q12, Q50,

On the Design of Public Infrastructure procurements

Public procurement of infrastructure has been subject to a long standing debate concerning the procurements' qualification requirements. Basically, it remains unclear what determines public procurement officers to vary procurements' qualification requirements. This research serves to elaborate on public procurements' procedure design. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of why contracting authorities choose specific requirements prior to public procurement. What determines variation in public procurements' qualification requirements? For this the procurements' procedure design is modelled as a rational choice among a set of alternatives within a random utility framework. Qualification requirements are chosen as to maximize utility of the procurements' officer. In the empirical part of the paper the procurements' procedure design is modelled as a limited dependent variable model. The data comes from the EIB Monitor Procurements covering public procurements in the Netherlands, and relates to public open procurements of civil work posted by municipalities in the first half of 2009. The model results indicate that requirements do relate to degree of professionalism of the procurement office and to the type of work. These results indicate a rational choice among qualification requirements yet explain about 15 percent of total variation, suggesting other factors at work