Waste pricing policies and cost-efficiency in municipal waste services: the case of Flanders.

Major changes in municipal solid waste (MSW)-related services, such as the collection system, often require important initial investments, while the benefits on the output side typically occur over a longer time perspective. However, when analyzing the association between such policy choices and cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal, the time horizon is often not taken into account. This article advocates the use of the Malmquist Productivity Index approach to measure and analyze cost efficiency changes over time after the introduction of the relative new weight-based waste collection and billing system in Flanders. The results and robustness checks indicate that introducing weight-based pricing does not lead to lower cost efficiency of MSW service provision.

The Economic Costs of Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Literature Review.

Autism is associated with a range of costs. This paper reviews the literature on estimating the economic costs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). More or less 50 papers covering multiple countries (US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc.) were analysed. Six types of costs are discussed in depth: (i) medical and healthcare service costs, (ii) therapeutic costs, (iii) (special) education costs, (iv) costs of production loss for adults with ASD, (v) costs of informal care and lost productivity for family/caregivers, and (vi) costs of accommodation, respite care, and out-of-pocket expenses. A general finding is that individuals with ASD and families with children with ASD have higher costs. Education costs appear to be a major cost component for parents with children with ASD.

Identifying the most relevant peers for benchmarking waste management performance: A conditional directional distance Benefit-of-the-Doubt approach.

The paper demonstrates that the outcome of the robust and conditional directional distance version of the BoD model not only contains information on the overall efficiency score and rank, but also enables a region to identify its genuine peers, disentangle the overall effect of the background conditions on the performance and assess one's relative strengths and relative weakness vis-à-vis its most relevant peers when evaluating its municipal solid waste management. We illustrate how this information can be retrieved from the outcomes of DEA/BoD based efficiency and performance benchmarking studies by applying the methodology to the case of the Brussels Capital Region. The results show that Freiburg Hamburg and the province of Limburg are in general the most interesting peers for the Brussels Capital Region. In addition, the analysis reveals that Freiburg is identified as the most instructive peers if the region is interested in improving its composting and recycling rate.

Evaluating the efficiency of municipalities in collecting and processing municipal solid waste: a shared input DEA-model.

This paper proposed an adjusted "shared-input" version of the popular efficiency measurement technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) that enables evaluating municipality waste collection and processing performances in settings in which one input (waste costs) is shared among treatment efforts of multiple municipal solid waste fractions. The main advantage of this version of DEA is that it not only provides an estimate of the municipalities overall cost efficiency but also estimates of the municipalities' cost efficiency in the treatment of the different fractions of municipal solid waste (MSW). To illustrate the practical usefulness of the shared input DEA-model, we apply the model to data on 293 municipalities in Flanders, Belgium, for the year 2008.

Wasteful waste-reducing policies? The impact of waste reduction policy instruments on collection and processing costs of municipal solid waste.

We study the impact of some local policies aimed at municipal solid waste (MSW) reduction on the cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal. We explicitly account for differences between municipalities in background conditions by using a bootstrapped version of the Data Envelopment Analysis methodology in combination with a matching technique. Using data on 299 municipalities in Flanders, Belgium, for the year 2003, our results indicate that municipalities that are member of a waste collection joint venture, or that subscribe to a voluntary agreement to reduce MSW at the highest ambition level, collect and process MSW more efficiently than other municipalities. Weekly instead of two-weekly waste collection, or using a weight-based pricing system appears to have no impact on efficiency. Our results show that aiming at MSW reduction does not lead to lower efficiency of public service provision, even on the contrary.

To publish or not to publish? On the aggregation and drivers of research performance.

This paper presents a methodology to aggregate multidimensional research output. Using a tailored version of the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis model, we account for the large heterogeneity in research output and the individual researcher preferences by endogenously weighting the various output dimensions. The approach offers three important advantages compared to the traditional approaches: (1) flexibility in the aggregation of different research outputs into an overall evaluation score; (2) a reduction of the impact of measurement errors and a-typical observations; and (3) a correction for the influences of a wide variety of factors outside the evaluated researcher's control. As a result, research evaluations are more effective representations of actual research performance. The methodology is illustrated on a data set of all faculty members at a large polytechnic university in Belgium. The sample includes questionnaire items on the motivation and perception of the researcher. This allows us to explore whether motivation and background characteristics (such as age, gender, retention, etc.,) of the researchers explain variations in measured research performance.