Volume 60, Issue 3

Although a lot has been philosophised about the relationship between competition and freedom, especially in the Freiburg School of Economics, there is still no universal or generally accepted definition of so-called free competition. The article attempts to find such a definition based on the Kantian notion of freedom. The definition found then seems to make necessary a new assessment of the prohibition of vertical agreements in EU competition law.

Currently, widespread discussions take place in the European Union whether to adopt IFRS for SMEs as a common accounting system for not public accountable entities. Also an analysis is given about the impact of the introduction of the Electronic Federal Gazette. The contribution chose the methodical approach of an interview survey with executives from 15 nonpublic accountable entities in order to explore the practical consequences of the vast amount of information which has to be provided by the notes of this accounting system. The interviews reveal that an adoption has consequences which need to be discussed from the viewpoint of regulatory policy and also that it would probably imply highly dysfunctional repercussions for not public accountable entities.

Climate change is one of the grand challenges of this century, but so is the eradication of hunger which is still present for roughly one billion people mainly in tropical countries. Both climate change and climate mitigation have an impact on the availability of food, especially in those regions that are particularly poor. Climate change is expected to affect most strongly the tropical regions thus reducing further the availability of suitable production conditions for agriculture. Climate mitigation can reduce the climate induced risk to food security, at the same time it has also a negative impact on food prices. First of all, climate policies raise the cost of energy which is an important component of the cost of agriculture. More importantly, many countries join the EU in supporting bioenergy production which directly competes with food production thus raising food prices. The world’s poor are most affected by such price increases since they spend most of their income on food products. Thus, increasing food prices directly translate into increasing hunger for those people. The current EU bioenergy policies are not yet strong enough to have a large impact on world markets. However, in the future bioenergy may pose a threat to food security for the poor.

In this essay the European energy and climate protection policy and its effects on developing countries are to be discussed. Are their nutrition problems being detereorated or do additional exports establish opportunities for a sustainable development? I argue that coherence of energy security and climate protection policy, as aimed by the European Commission, cannot be achieved by the measures taken so far. First of all the paper discusses the primacy of competition policy while, in the second place, strategic selectivity of climate instruments will be dealt with. Thridly, the „faith in technology“ will be approached and the fourth issue is dedicated to agrofuels and the commodification of developing countries’ ressources. As a result the EU energy and climate policy is about to aggravate nutrition problems. What is needed is a Transformation to a sustainable economy to realigning the north-south divide on the one and to overcome inconsistencies between ener gy security and climate policy on the other hand.

Food demand is strongly correlated to population growth and income growth. Both will lead to a strong demand increase in the future. At the same time, the agricultural products will increasingly be needed as energy resources. Boundaries to production growth are given by resources such as land and water and by efficiency of production. Current projections show that until 2030 there will be no global shortage in food production. Availability of land and water is sufficiently high to increase production. Furthermore efficiency of production can be increased. However production and demand are very unevenly distributed in world. Free market prices and open borders are central for the production increase in regions with corresponding potentials.

The authors analyze the question which measures will be most efficient in reducing CO 2 -Emissions if a country has chosen a reduction target. They compare the possibilities of using taxes or subsidies to internalize externalities. They assert that internalizing externalities through subsidies is not possible in a consistent way and will create new distortions in the economy, in contrast to a tax approach. Additionally, the tax approach leads to increasing state revenues which can be used to improve the allocation in the whole economy. Therefore the tax approach should be expended and redeem existing subsidies. Zusammenfassung Die Autoren analysieren die Frage, mit welchen Maßnahmen CO 2 -Emissionen zu den geringsten Kosten reduziert werden können, wenn ein Land sich für eine bestimmte Emissionsreduktion entschieden hat. Dafür werden die Möglichkeiten der Internalisierung der externen Effekte durch CO 2 - Emissionen durch Abgaben oder Subventionen miteinander verglichen. Es zeigt sich, dass die Internalisierung der externen Effekte durch Subventionen nicht konsistent gelingen kann und zu weiteren Verzerrungen in der Preisstruktur führt, im Gegensatz zu einer Abgabenlösung. Diese führt zusätzlich zu staatlichen Einnahmen, durch die allokationsverzerrende Steuern ersetzt werden können. Die Abgabenlösung sollte deshalb konsequent ausgeweitet werden und den Subventionsansatz vollständig ablösen.

It has been a policy proposal since long to vertically separate transport and infrastructure in Germany’s railway sector. The proposal received new momentum, when selling the transport subsidiaries of Deutsche Bahn AG to the public was discussed in 2008 / 2009. While vertical separation is general ly understood to prevent foreclosure and discrimination by the incumbent network- operator, advocates of vertical integration claim separation to have adverse effects on access prices to the infrastructure. We examine the price setting incentives of an integrated and a separated network-operator and compare our results to rough empirical findings on the profitability of the Deutsche Bahn AG infrastructure branches. Theoretical analysis highlights that after separation exceptional mark-ups on access prices to the railwayinfrastructure are feasible only in segments of railway-transport with insufficient competition. We therefore conclude that an economic policy for the railway sector directed on efficient supply and promoting effective competition should unbind itself from alleged price synergies and should press ahead with vertical separation instead.