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This paper analyzes the demand for recreation in Swiss forests using the individual travel cost method. We apply a two-steps approach, i.e., a hurdle zerotruncated negative binomial model, that allows accounting for a large number of nonvisitors caused by the off-site phone survey and over-dispersion. Given the national scale of the survey, we group forest zones to assess consumer surpluses and travel cost elasticities for relatively homogeneous forest types.We find that forest recreation activities are travel cost inelastic and show that recreation in Swiss forests provides large benefits to the population. The most populated area is associated with greater consumer surpluses, but the lack of recreational infrastructure may cause a lower recreational benefit in some zones. For these zones, recreational benefits may be lower than costs caused by maintenance. More efficient management would require either improving recreational infrastructure thus increasing benefits, or switching the forest status from recreational to biodiversity forest hence decreasing management costs.

The objective of this review study is to improve the proficiency of cost calculation and forecasting in pandemic risk management. The 2009 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic has generated additional data and triggered new studies that open debate over the optimal strategy for handling a pandemic. A point of improvement for the risk analysis of such crises that is often mentioned in lessons-learned documents from the World Health Organization and governments is the need for cost estimation of the pandemic response. The assessment of costs during a pandemic poses particular problems related to the appropriate modeling of the characteristic of the virus and the direct effects of an intervention and its impact on costs. Further difficulties arise when trying to relate those costs to overall societal welfare, such as choosing the appropriate societal costs for an intervention or assessing the value of statistical life. In this study, we explore the lessons learned and innovation emerging from the past crisis, with a focus on studies covering high-income countries. We review a number of academic studies and organizational documents that provide cost-effectiveness or cost-benefit analyses for A/H1N1 pandemic interventions since 2009. Our comparative analysis reviews each study’s type of intervention, epidemiological model, type of costs included and cost-utility results with a possible conversion to cost-benefit. The result is an extensive reflection on the parameters that may drive the pandemic costs and the appropriate response, which is unique to our knowledge in both the breadth of coverage and the novelty of selected studies. At the cross-disciplinary level, this study stresses the need for an economic efficiency analysis in the risk governance process to distribute financial resources in the most efficient way.

In this paper, we assess the economic efficiency of Swiss water utilities. To reach this aim, we accessed a new and unexploited database, which counts 330 water utilities, representing about 55% of the drinking water distributed in Switzerland. The database spans over six years (2000-2005) and offers information on the type of the water production process, the characteristics of the network and the costs of water supply. This database presents an original opportunity to analyse the cost of water supply and to determine the efficiency of the water utilities. Such a study has never been done for Switzerland. We apply a stochastic cost function approach to measure cost inefficiency and to investigate the impact of environmental characteristics outside the control of the water utilities (e.g. type of water and customer density) on costs and inefficiency measures. Our results show that environmental factors have a significant influence on costs. Including exogenous variables in the analysis lowers industry inefficiency scores and provides indicators of managerial performance.

Les analyses économiques de l’environnement permettent d’évaluer en termes monétaires les impacts environnementaux d’activités économiques. Depuis 1997, le secteur du ciment au Maroc recourt à ce type d’analyses (Ecosys & sba, 2004, 2007, 2008) afin de rendre compte des bénéfices environnementaux résultant de l’investissement de plus de 1 milliards de dirhams (89 millions d’euros) en mesures de remédiation. Ce cahier de recherche résume les principaux résultats des analyses effectuées et positionne ainsi le secteur marocain du ciment tant du point de vue de son développement économique que sous l’angle de sa performance environnementale. Environmental economic analyses of an industrial sector enable the evaluation of related environmental impacts in monetary terms. Since 1997, the Moroccan cement sector has engaged in improving its environmental performances. This research paper presents the results of the environmental economic studies (Ecosys & sba, 2004, 2007, 2008) that estimate the environmental benefits related to the 1 billion dirham (89 million euro) spent for environmental protection. It shows that the Moroccan cement sector managed to reduce its environmental damages while increasing its economic value

Cette thèse est dévolue à l'examen empirique d'une hypothèse particulière décrivant la relation entre la croissance des revenus et la qualité de l'environnement : la courbe environnementale de Kuznets (CEK). Elle est composée de trois parties. La première examine l'ensemble des travaux empiriques disponibles sur la CEK au moyen d'une méta-analyse. La seconde partie cherche à identifier les déterminants de la demande d'environnement par l'observation des choix effectués lors de votations populaires. La troisième examine finalement l'évolution des coûts macro-économiques de réduction des émissions de CO₂ lors de l'augmentation des revenus. Les résultats qui en émanent montrent que la CEK demeure une relation instable et non systématique. De manière plus précise, bien que l'évolution des coûts macro-économiques de réduction de la pollution semble favorable à l'apparition de la CEK, l'analyse des déterminants des choix révèle, par contre, que la demande d'environnement d'un individu n'est pas tributaire de son revenu.