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Air pollutants often have adverse effects on human health. This paper investigates and ranks a set of policy and technological interventions intended to reduce such health costs in the high population density areas of South Africa. It initially uses a simple benefit–cost rule, later extended to capture sectoral employment impacts. Although the focus of state air quality legislation is on industrial pollutants, the most efficient interventions were found to be at household level. These included such low-cost interventions as training householders to place kindling above rather than below the coal in a fireplace and insulating roofs. The first non-household policies to emerge involved vehicle fuels and technologies. Most proposed industrial interventions failed a simple cost–benefit test. The paper''s policy messages are that interventions should begin with households and that further industry controls are not yet justifiable in their present forms as these relate to the health care costs of such interventions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A recent environmental impact assessment of a proposed new toll road in Cape Town, South Africa raised some interesting questions, particularly with respect to the impacts of routing a road through an environmentally sensitive area. The paper discusses the challenges encountered in assessing the economic implications of this routing and how workable methodological solutions were arrived at. Our approach was to investigate the longer-term opportunity costs associated with the preferred routing. This was done through focusing on the strategic importance of the area without necessarily engaging in detailed quantification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the application of two models for determining the optimal location and characteristics of a casino in a post-apartheid South Africa. The intention in developing the models was to allow provinces a facility for considering how to maximize the return to the stakeholders in the license award process, namely society at large, as represented by the provincial government, and the casino operator. The Allocation Model works on an estimate of total potential gambling spend and how that may be best distributed amongst a number of casinos. The Profitability model takes the estimated gaming spend from the allocation model and assesses the appropriate size and characteristics of the casino best suited to this level of gaming spend. It can then simulate levels of profitability for different proposed sizes and characteristics of proposed casinos. Together these models represent a powerful assessment mechanism for a country considering the introduction or radical changing of gaming legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]