Publications
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Benefit Assessment: Introduction
15th November 2003
Publication by The Environment Agency. When the water industry was privatised, the intention was to facilitate a substantial investment programme to rebuild the water and sewerage systems after a long period of neglect and to substantially improve environmental quality. It was envisaged that the National Rivers Authority (the predecessor of the Environmental Agency, EA)would set the quality requirements in consultation with the Department of the Environment (subsequently the DETR and now Defra...
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Benefit Assessment: The Context
15th November 2003
Publication by The Environment Agency. The periodic-review process requires a five-year cycle of fixing the capital investment programme of the water industry. This programme is the outcome of considerations of the legal requirements (typically defined by EU directives), desirable environmental improvements and the willingness of consumers to pay. Defra has the role of striking this balance in its guidance to the EA and Ofwat; the EA has the role of proposing the requirements; and Ofwat has the...
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Introduction to 'Air Transport and Infrastructure '
1st November 2003
In D. Helm and D. Holt (eds.), 'Air Transport and Infrastructure: The Challenges Ahead', published November 2003 by Oxera, pp. 1-4. In committing itself to providing a 30-year framework for air transport policy, the government recognised that the existing approach of ad hoc interventions, delayed decisions and the consequent congestion could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. A ten-year transport strategy had been set out for the railways (DETR, 2000); a new energy policy was eventually...
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DTI Inquiry into UKCS Indigenous Oil and Gas Exploitation
20th October 2003
This memorandum provides a number of comments on Prof Peter Odell's paper submitted to the Committee in June 2003, and in particular on his three main claims - that the 2003 Energy White Paper fails to reflect the importance of the wider contribution of North Sea oil and gas to the economy; that the sharp decline in gas production is overstated; and that there needs to be a new institutional emphasis given to the husbanding and exploitation of these resources.
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Water Prices: Memorandum to House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
17th October 2003
The water periodic review currently under way has raised substantive issues about the nature of the regulatory regime, as well as the appropriateness of proposed price increases, and its impact on current and future customers. This memorandum summarises the causes of the proposed price increases for the period 2005-10, and considers the consequences of the flight from equity which has followed the 2000 periodic-review outcome. A number of recommendations for the conduct of the current review...
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Time-inconsistent Environmental Policy and Optimal Delegation
1st October 2003
By D. Helm, C. Hepburn and R. Mash, Oxford University Department of Economics Discussion Paper 175, October 2003. Time consistency problems can arise when environmental taxes are employed to encourage firms to take irreversible abatement decisions. Setting a high carbon tax, for instance, would induce firms to invest in low-carbon technology, yet once investment has occurred the government can then reduce the carbon tax to better achieve other objectives; lower energy prices, redistribution,...
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The Best Chance in Decades
29th September 2003
Published in the New Statesman, September 29th 2003, pp. xiii-xiv. We know burning fossil fuels is dangerous to the planet, too - so it's time we took a fresh look at the nuclear waste stalemate.
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DTI Transport Committee Inquiry into The Future of the Railways
10th September 2003
The government set out a new direction for transport policy in its integrated transport strategy White Paper, 'A New Deal for Transport: Better for Everyone', published in July 1998. This was followed by the 'Ten Year Plan'. A new era for the railways expansion was envisaged, which would be justified on economic and environmental grounds. Road building was severely curtailed, and a policy in roads of 'predict and provide' abandoned.
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The Assessment: Climate-change Policy
1st September 2003
Published in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 19(3), 349-361. The paper provides a guide to climate-change policy, and, in particular, the three core components: targets, instruments, and institutional structures. First, the optimal path for reducing carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions, and the role of the social cost of carbon in the estimation and revision of the path are set out. Second, the policy instruments, or combination of instruments, taxes, permits, and command-and-control, which are...
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Credible Carbon Policy
1st September 2003
By D. Helm, C. Hepburn and R. Mash, published in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 19(3), 438-450. The paper sets out the credibility problem in carbon policy, provides a number of examples of non-credibility in recent energy policy, and identifies the costs of failing to address it. The time inconsistency of carbon policy - arising because of multiple objectives, the irreversibility of energy investments, and the scope for ex-post reneging on ex-ante commitments to set policy instruments,...