18 research outputs found
4.2. Les projets pour la rive sud
No full textLes deux projets sont complémentaires, dans un dialogue entre présence historique et extension nouvelle, ils représentent deux aspects d’un projet urbain d’ensemble, s’enchaînant le long de la rive au droit de la ville historique et vers le méandre du fleuve, visant tous deux à permettre de nouvelles fonctions urbaines dans la mise en valeur du fleuve et de ses abords. 4.2.1. Projet pour la cité historique, ou comment souligner la muraille Étienne Besson, Alexandre Crampes, Hugues Joineau, Fa..
Regulatory tradeoffs in designing concession contracts for infrastructure networks
No full textNetwork activities typically involve collecting a good or service (such as electric utilities, phone services, and rail transportation) from many producers or distributing them to many users. Producers and users are often widely scattered, geographically. Close financial integration of networks is justified on the basis of economies of scope and scale and the benefits from pooling and coordinating. In many countries, network operators are completely integrated publicly-owned firms (private firms being deemed insufficiently efficient or equitable). Challengers of this practice contend that the inefficiency resulting from lack of competition outweighs the gain from economic integration. With reform, some competitive mechanisms can be introduced even when monopoly seems the best option for delivering a service. But conflicts between policymakers'objectives -including efficiency, equity, speed, speed of reform, and signaling- influence the design of concession contracts for infrastructure network services (including communications and transportation services). Competition begins with the unbundling of various stages of delivery. Then competitive bidding is popular, with the public authority keeping property rights on productive assets but conceding their operation to a private firm. The winner gets the right to maximize profits, within limits (having to provide universal services, for example, and avoid price discrimination). In liberalizing the delivery of a service, policymakers must consider not only efficiency but also social and fiscal feasibility. The authors discuss how relevant information asymmetry is in contract design and the award and regulatory processes. They also discuss how to design pricing to accommodate the obligation to provide universal service. To illustrate, they describe Argentina's experiment in liberalization, which is increasingly viewed as a model for changing private sector and government involvement in infrastructure services. Beginning in 1989, Argentina began privatizing utilities and transport services, because the government had decided that it could no longer afford to subsidize those services or finance the investments needed for their effective operation. To introduce competition, the government unbundled services and introduced competitive bidding. It also created sector-specific regulatory agencies to protect consumers from private monopolies and to protect the private concessionaires from government micromanagement. Making concession-based reform and contracted-based regulation of private monopolists sustainable will require strengthening regulatory agencies, clarifying their terms of reference and accountability, and better separating the responsibilities of sector ministers and regulators.Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Education for the Knowledge Economy,Knowledge Economy,Economic Theory&Research
Essays in Economics of the Pharmaceutical Industry
No full textL’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier le fonctionnement de l’industrie pharmaceutique, et plus particulièrement les choix stratégiques des entreprises et leurs relations avec l’environnement économique et le degré de régulation. Ainsi, le premier chapitre s’intéresse aux choix de recherche et développement et de publicité des laboratoires en fonction du degré de concurrence. Le deuxième chapitre est une analyse des effets de l’introduction de la procédure de négociation anticipée des prix des médicaments entre les entreprises et les autorités de régulation en France sur les délais de mise sur le marché des nouvelles molécules. Enfin, le dernier chapitre est une étude sur les conséquences en termes de bien-être social et d’incitations à l’entrée sur le marché pour les concurrents basée sur un cas de collusion entre deux fabricants de génériques aux Etats-Unis.The objective of this thesis is to study the functioning of the pharmaceutical industry, and more precisely the strategic decisions of firms and their links with the economic environment and the degree of regulation. The focus of the first chapter is on the research and development and advertising decisions as a function of competition intensity. The second chapter analyses the effects of the introduction of an anticipated price bargaining procedure between firms and regulatory authorities in France on the launch dates of new molecules. Finally, the last chapter studies the consequences in terms of welfare and incentives for new entrants of collusion between two generic drugs producers in the US
Information, accounting, and the regulation of concessioned infrastructure monopolies
No full textEconomists often characterize the regulation of monopolies as a"game"(between the regulator and the service provider) in which the two players do not share the same information. The regulator is assumed to have poorer information than the service provider about the scope of future efficiency gains and the size and timing of future investment plans. Over time, the regulator must increase its information base so that regulatory targets become more realistic - but this is a costly process. The authors examine the ways such information can and should be generated, especially throughthe accounting requirements a regulator can impose on private operators of infrastructure concessions. (They view concessioning and regulation as complementary, not substitute, activities.) Concessionaires should provide regulators with the information they need to: 1) Compare outcomes with expectations. 2) Evaluate the cost of adverse shocks that may warrant relaxed regulations. 3) Evaluate whether lower costs than expected are the result of better performance or diminished output. 4) Properly evaluate the asset base and charge for the consumption of capital. Information that regulators get from private operators of infrastructure monopolies should be used to make both regulators and concessionaires accountable. In Chile, for example, the privatization of monopolies led to significant efficiency gains, but it took a long time for these gains to be passed on to users because neither the firms nor the regulators were held accountable - until Congress expressed reluctance to endorse further privatization because earlier waves of privatization had not benefited consumers. In other words, information should be used to make regulatory decisions more transparent and to reduce the risk of the private providers"capturing"the regulators.Labor Policies,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Decentralization,Financial Intermediation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Banks&Banking Reform
Pension reform in Latin America : quick fixes or sustainable reform?
No full textBecause of better health and higher standards of living, people are living longer. By 2030, more than 16 percent of the world's population will be older than 60, compared with 9 percent today. As a result, pension systems will need reform. Most current systems have substantial unfunded liabilities that will impose significant financial burdens onfuture generations without providing adequate protection for older individuals and lower-income workers. Pension reform is inevitable because of demographic imperatives and because many pension systems are financially unsustainable. Unfunded public pension systems pose political risk if promises to future retirees cannot be met. Pension reform is both technically and politically complex but more and more countries are beginning to address the problem. The question is whether to adopt quick fixes or sustainable changes that will benefit the macroeconomy and protect elderly and lower-income citizens. Quick fixes--typical in many economies--generally involve changes in eligibility (such as retirement age), changes in the rate of contribution or the population of workers on which contributions are calculated, or changes in the structure of benefits. Countries in Latin America have been ahead of other regions in undertaking major reform from pay-as-you-go defined-benefit pension plans to fully funded, defined-contribution pension plans. Because of the successful Chilean pension model, a notable number of Latin American countries have undertaken deep pension reform. The author highlights reform efforts in a sample of countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru. Vigilance is still needed, says the author. Effective oversight is essential, and so is complementary reform in the banking, insurance, and securities markets. In capital markets, for example, regulation must be strengthened and the requirement that pension fund investments be made only in government-related securities must be eliminated. New types of insurance must be made available and there must be increased competition among insurance providers. More work must be done but the region's pension systems have started on the right course.Banks&Banking Reform,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Public Health Promotion,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Pensions&Retirement Systems,Economic Stabilization,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research
Etude critique sur la parenté morbide du bégaiement avec les tics et les crampes fonctionnelles
No full textThèse : Médecine : Université de Bordeaux : 1906N° d'ordre : 12
Concession contract renegotiations : some efficiency versus equity dilemmas
No full textThe authors analyze the possibility of tradeoffs between efficiency and equity as well as the possibility of distributional conflicts in the context of renegotiation of infrastructure contracts in developing countries. To do so, they present a model in which contracts are awarded by auctioning the right to operate an infrastructure service to a private monopoly, and consider the possibility of renegotiation. To identify the potential sources of tradeoffs, they trackthe possible outcomes of different renegotiation strategies for the monopoly running the concession and for the two groups of consumers-rich and poor-who alternate in power according to a majority voting rule. Among the model? most important policy implications is this: if having firm-driven renegotiations is a major concern, efficiency should not be the only consideration in selecting an operator. Indeed, consumers may want to award the concession to a less efficient firm if that would reduce the probability of renegotiation, since a lower probability of firm-driven renegotiations (due to demand shocks, for example) is associated with higher welfare for all service users.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Markets and Market Access,Economic Theory&Research,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism
Infrastructure project finance and capital flows : a new perspective
No full textThe success with which middle-income indebted developing countries have gained access to private international finance in the 1990s is a tribute to their own domestic economic performance, international policy in dealing with the debt crisis of the 1980s, and innovation in international financial markets. Emphasizing the role of private infrastructure investment as a vehicle for attracting foreign capital to developing countries in the 1990s, the authors develop an analysis model to examine what determines the credit-risk premium on infrastructure projects in the country-risk environment of developing countries. They also provide tentative quantitative evidence of the importance of macroeconomic and project-specific attributes of project risk. Their key finding is that the market seems to impose a high-risk premium on loans to countries with high inflation and to projects in the road sector.Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Banks&Banking Reform,Financial Intermediation,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Environmental Economics&Policies,Financial Intermediation,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform
Mind the Semantic Gap
No full textHypertext can be seen as a logic representation, where semantics are encoded in both the textual nodes and the graph of links. Systems that have a very formal representation of these semantics are able to manipulate the hypertexts in a sophisticated way; for example by adapting them or sculpting them at run-time. However, hypertext systems which require the author to write in terms of structures with explicit semantics are difficult/costly to write in, and can be seen as too restrictive by certain authors because they do not allow the playful ambiguity often associated with literary hypertext. In this paper we present a vector-based model of the formality of semantics in hypertext systems, where the vectors represent the translation of semantics from author to system and from system to reader. We categorise a variety of existing systems and draw out some general conclusions about the profiles they share. We believe that our model will help hypertext system designers analyse how their own systems formalise semantics, and will warn them when they need to mind the Semantic Gap between authors and readers
Comparing the performance of public and private water companies in the Asia and Pacific region : what a stochastic costs frontier shows
No full textEstache and Rossi estimate a stochastic costs frontier for a sample of Asian and Pacific water companies, comparing the performance of public and privatized companies based on detailed firm-specific information published by the Asian Development Bank in 1997. They find private operators of water companies to be more efficient than public operators. Costs in concessioned companies tend to be significantly lower than those in public companies. The authors show that rankings based on standard indicators are not always very consistent. This paper contributes to that growing literature. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical structure of the cost model estimated. Section 3 provides an overview of earlier studies of the water sector. Section 4 presents the estimates of costs frontiers obtained for a large sample of Asian and Pacific Region water companies, distinguishing between public and private operators. Section 5 compares the performance ranking from efficiency frontier measures to those obtained from productivity indicators. Section 6 concludes.Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Water Conservation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Water Supply and Sanitation Governance and Institutions,Water and Industry,Economic Theory&Research,Town Water Supply and Sanitation
