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The purpose of this paper is to review current policy and practice in management of analogue‐digital switch in broadcasting.

The paper adopts a case study approach.

The paper finds that with regard the objectives of switch‐off, the broad policy aims of clearing spectrum, modernising infrastructure, and improving the services to the consumer are shared across the major countries studied. Uncertainty about the cash value and potential alternative uses of spectrum is natural given rapid technological change, but the common potential broadcasting uses include mobile television, high definition digital terrestrial television, and more digital broadcasters and channels, including regional and local developments.

The study is restricted to Europe, Japan and North America.

The study has implications for assessment of European switchover strategies and role of Digital Terrestrial.

There are some overviews, but none of so up to date, nor with this geographical coverage.

It is widely accepted that next‐generation infrastructures will improve economic growth and employment. However, the cost of such a roll‐out is high and profitability is uncertain. Therefore operators hesitate to invest massively. In such a context, public intervention could help rollout. Several forms of intervention are possible. This paper aims to study, more specifically, subsidy strategies: subsidising demand by a contribution to each household's subscription fee for a pre‐determined time (a refund, a tax cut) or subsidising infrastructure by means of a contribution to operators' infrastructure costs.

The paper uses a dynamic mathematical model based on industrial organization and numerical examples based on techno‐economic analysis.

This paper shows that subsidising demand is more efficient, in welfare terms, than infrastructure subsidies as long as the time required for private operators to cover an area, without subsidies, is shorter than the duration of the subsidies required to cover the same area immediately, thanks to the increase in consumers' willingness to pay.

This paper can help policy makers to optimise public investments in the next‐generation infrastructure.

This paper highlights the leverage that subsidies can provide to infrastructure roll‐out in a dynamic point of view.

This paper aims to examine the main characteristics of the housing taxation and subsidy systems in six European Union countries. The structure of this support over the past two decades, before and after the global financial crisis has been investigated and its total effective dimensions have been approximated.

Official national data and existing literature on housing policy expenses have been analysed and the authors add their own estimations of missing data, where possible. Latest changes in housing policy guidelines and expenses were interpreted.

It was found that state support for housing is heavily underestimated by official data in most countries, mainly due to missing estimates for the value of imputed rents tax relief, reduced VAT rates and low real estate and capital gains taxation. Our estimates suggest that total public support for the housing sector reaches more than 3 per cent of the gross domestic product in three of the six countries, and about 2 per cent in the others. State support to the housing sector has developed quite differently in the investigated countries over the past decades. In particular, there was no universal downward trend.

This is the first attempt to provide a more comprehensive analysis of national housing policy expenses applying a very broad definition of state support for housing. In particular, we consider indirect tax advantages to the housing sector that are generally not taken into account. Furthermore, we apply a discounted present value approach of current housing policy expenses to facilitate international comparison.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent that interest subsidies have impacted on the total production of Swedish single‐ and multifamily houses. It also intends to examine whether tenure neutrality provision of interest subsidy that subsidy policy advocates was maintained.

Using a multiple regression of two models, a balanced panel data from 1975 to 2006 that consist of various related construction cost variables of all regions of Sweden will be analyzed. Instrumental variable (IV) and seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) will be utilized to examine the role of subsidy on housing production and tenure neutrality, respectively.

The results seem to indicate that a general subsidy is expected to be ineffective since it may increase the existing stocks of a low demand region but not the housing stocks of big regions where the demand is high. Moreover, a targeted subsidy may change the balance between different types of housings since lower construction costs due to the subsidy could favor the development of certain profitable housing types.

The paper tries to substantiate (empirically) the assertion that subsidy policies contributed both to the production of housing units in low demand regions and distortion of the preference of different tenures.

This paper aims to explore the impact of the joint operation of affordability policies and whether their impact is meaningful relative to the size of the affordability crisis. Its purpose is to construct the features of a comprehensive policy package linked to a measurable outcome: solving the affordability crisis in Auckland. This study investigates the scale and nature of an affordability package that responds to three research and policy questions: What should the rate of annual growth of affordable housing be to solve the affordability crisis? Consequently, how long would it take to solve it? And how much would that policy package cost?

In this paper, the authors argue that the disjoint operation of affordability policies is one of the reasons why their impacts relative to the size of the affordability crisis has been small or negligible. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that affordability is as much about raising households’ incomes as it is about lowering housing prices. This study uses a modelling-based framework to simulate some of the levers that local and central governments have to affect housing prices and affordability: direct intervention on the supply-side and subsidies. Specifically, this simulates retention-and-targeting (RT) programs and subsidies to raise deposits via shared ownership (SO) schemes.

This study finds that solving the affordability crisis would take a decade if the supply of affordable housing increases by at least 45% annually. With the introduction of RT and SO programs, it could still be solved within a decade, where the required growth rate decreases to 35%. However, for growth rates between 5% and 10%, the policy goal is met in approximately 40 years, and the SO program becomes exceedingly expensive.

Housing affordability is one of the hottest policy issues in New Zealand and the developed world. In the past decade, a number of affordability policies have been introduced with limited success due to their lack of interoperability and siloed efforts. Results in this paper should be interpreted as the boundaries of what is feasible and realistic in the realm of affordability policies. Therefore, its contribution relies on investigating the multiple effects if the financial, administrative and political barriers to RT and SO programs could be overcome. Its scope is a blueprint for the design of policies in other cities where unaffordability has become extreme.

Governments in a number of countries have introduced policies to increase the labour force participation of persons with disabilities. Many of these policies have displayed a legislative or compulsory element as in the case of workforce quotas. In 1981 the Australian Government introduced a price strategy in which employers were induced to increase their job offers to the disabled through a system of wage subsidy and workplace modification schemes. The performance of these schemes became an interesting test of the general policy of using market variables to influence what many regard as essentially a social problem. The results achieved in this article indicate that the wage subsidy programme has not been effective nor, given current employer attitudes, is it likely to be in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a guideline for the European Union (EU) to support high-speed broadband development based on economic frameworks and successful countries, Korea and Sweden. In the past decade, both policymakers and academic scholars have so far emphasised broadband policy mostly on the supply side. Increasing broadband adoption, nevertheless, is important for the EU to meet its Digital Agenda. Therefore, demand-side policy is also needed to stimulate high-speed broadband adoption in the EU.

This paper applies frameworks of network externalities and the information and communications technology ecosystem to provide a better understanding of the relationship between supply- and demand-side policies. In addition, Korea and Sweden, which are two successful countries in high-speed broadband development particularly their demand-side policy, are chosen as a comparative case study.

Both supply and demand sides are important to broadband policy to achieve the EU Digital Agenda 2020. It is also important for the policymakers to consider that demand-side policy should complement the implementation of supply-side policy, not substitute it. The demand side can be a great driver, especially with the development of content and applications for high-speed broadband.

This paper fills the research gap on broadband policy on the demand side which is currently limited in comparison to the supply-side studies.

This paper aims to study the results of the public aid programmes, through supply-side subsidies, for ultra-fast next generation access (NGA) broadband deployment that have been developed in The Canary Islands since 2013. These findings will, in turn, hopefully help the policymakers of archipelagos define their own ultra-fast broadband development plans.

An empirical approach has been used, based on the observation of the historical results obtained in the archipelago and the way broadband was diffused throughout the territory.

Results show that the broadband has developed asymmetrically in the archipelago, which, in turn, has caused the onset of a triple spatial digital divide. It was also observed that some aspects of the current way that such programmes are created and, consequently, the way that public funds are allocated, that could be improved and might help prevent geographical discrimination. Lastly, several insights have been presented for further investigation.

A large amount of scientific research has been carried out studying ultra-fast broadband NGA networks deployment. Less literature can be found on this topic when considering the specificities of fragmented territories like archipelagos. This paper tries to contribute with some empirical insights about such specific scenarios.

Affordable homeownership is a policy that is often accorded a great deal of policy attention by governments of many countries. This paper aims to examine the market implications of setting a housing price to income ratio target for a market segment by the government.

The policy requires active intervention by the government with regard to the targeted sector. The paper uses a simple model of the housing market with a homeownership affordability target to derive the market implications of such targets.

In the presence of uncertainty and resource constraints, the objective of homeownership affordability is achieved for the targeted group at the expense of greater volatility in residential construction activity. When the size of the targeted sector is significant in size, there are spillover price and crowding out effects on the non‐targeted housing market segment.

This results in political pressure on the government to expand homeownership affordability targets to increasing segments of the population. Housing price to income ratios tend to be fairly constant over time and across targeted groups, the housing supply is relatively price inelastic and the income elasticity of housing demand is less than one.

The Singapore government intervenes extensively in the housing sector to ensure homeownership affordability, with a resulting homeownership rate of 91 percent for the resident population. The above hypotheses regarding the implications of setting housing price to income ratio targets are tested using the Singapore housing market.

This paper adds to the literature by analyzing the market implications of setting homeownership affordability targets in the context of a targeted housing segment.

Since 1980, the principal form of crop loss assistance in the United States has been provided through the Federal Crop Insurance Program. The Federal Crop Insurance Act of 1980 was intended to replace disaster programs with a subsidized insurance program that farmers could depend on in the event of crop losses. Crop insurance was seen as preferable to disaster assistance because it was less costly and hence could be provided to more producers, was less likely to encourage moral hazard, and less likely to encourage producers to plant crops on marginal lands. Despite substantial growth in the program, the crop insurance program has failed to replace other disaster programs as the sole form of assistance. Over the past 20 years, producers received an estimated $15 billion in supplemental disaster payments in addition to $22 billion in crop insurance indemnities.