The one-third rule: Learning about the net economic benefit of a subsidy from a single observation

The subsidization of a natural monopoly is justified on welfare-economic grounds if the resulting total economic surplus exceeds total costs. Using rather standard assumptions, a simple check, managing with a minimum of information and, in particular, without virtually any knowledge of the demand curve, is developed which is capable of confirming an existing economic case for subsidization.     

Changing security cultures in Europe and Southeast Asia: Implications for inter-regionalism

Recent development in Southeast Asia demonstrates a slowly but steadily changing security culture from, first, an informal, consensus-based and often hidden way of managing security to a more open and explicit discourse and, second, from a statist realist definition of security as hard or military security to a broader, liberal understanding that covers the whole spectrum of human, economic and environmental security. This security culture in the making also touches upon formerly tabooed issues such as sovereignty and humanitarian intervention. The paper argues that the new approach has removed obstacles in relations between Europe and East Asia and contributed to the emergence of security as a cornerstone of the co-operation agenda since 1998. At the same time, however, a rapid translation of the inter-regional discourse on security into a working programme or even specific policies is hindered by the prevalence of diverging views on the nature, scope and degree of institutionalisation in Europe-East Asia relations.     

Contests Among Bureaucrats

This paper deals with double lobbying: several bureaucratsparticipate in joint lobbying to get a high total departmental budget, butthey also engage in antagonistic lobbying to reap as high a share of thetotal budget as possible. The antagonistic lobbyingconstitutes a contest among the bureaucrats. This papercharacterizes the Nash equilibria in lobbying and shows inwhich way exogenously fixed bureaucratic incomes induce thesame or different lobbying behavior as incentive incomes.     

欧洲对于私生活的法律保护:法国与德国的比较

比较法的研究有助于对欧盟成员国的不同法律传统的理解.①加强共同体公民的法律保障必须要借助于对其基本权利的保护.②在发现成员国的法律保护机制之间存在一定的相似性之后,比较法研究可以揭示出成员国国内法之间存在的一些重要差别.对于法国和德国尤其是如此.     

Feminist consciousness vs profit—an unsolvable contradiction?

To survive in the capitalist system (which we are still part of), we have to deal with money, and in order to keep our projects going we have to make profit. The cold principles that rule the market will often clash with our feminist ideas of humane collectivity, but I will argue that we better face these conflicts and integrate them in our work structures, because the system sneaks in anyway and finds us unprepared and fighting with each other.