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Harvesting beach-cast can help mitigate marine eutrophication by closing land-marine nutrient loops and provide a blue biomass raw material for the bioeconomy. Cost–benefit analysis was applied to harvest activities during 2009–2018 on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, highlighting benefits such as nutrient removal from the marine system and improved recreational opportunities as well as costs of using inputs necessary for harvest. The results indicate that the activities entailed a net gain to society, lending substance to continued funding for harvests on Gotland and assessments of upscaling of harvest activities to other areas in Sweden and elsewhere. The lessons learnt from the considerable harvest experience on Gotland should be utilized for developing concrete guidelines for carrying out sustainable harvest practice, paying due attention to local conditions but also to what can be generalized to a wider national and international context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims: The aim of this study was to estimate the healthcare costs and productivity losses associated with county‐based home‐care services (HCS) for sick children. Methods: In this observational follow‐up study, a combination of hospital care and HCS was compared to estimated alternative care solely at the hospital. Data on one year of healthcare utilisation for 32 children, supplied by the hospital and HCS, were collected from administrative systems. Corresponding healthcare unit prices were collected from healthcare pricelists. The human‐capital approach was applied to estimate productivity losses and the value of productivity losses for 25 parents. Family characteristics, including parental work absenteeism and income, were collected by a questionnaire distributed to parents at five time points during a year. Descriptive and comparative statistics were used for analysis and carried out with ethical approval. Results: Healthcare costs for children receiving a combination of hospital care and HCS varied among children with estimated average healthcare cost savings of SEK 50 101 per child compared to the alternative of care provided only in the hospital. The reduced costs were related to children receiving nonpalliative HCS care tasks. Average annual productivity losses due to parental work absenteeism were estimated at 348 hours with an associated monetary value estimated at SEK 137 524 per parent. Conclusion: County‐based HCS, provided as complement to and substitute for hospital care for ill children, does not increase healthcare cost and should be a prioritized area when organising paediatric health care. Productivity losses vary greatly among parents and are pronounced also when children receive HCS with signs of gender‐related differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms that operate combined heat and power (CHP) plants in Sweden face strong incentives to let their district heating (DH) customers subsidize the sales of electricity. This study investigates whether firms exploit the variation in competitive intensity across the two markets and 1) shift costs from electricity to DH, and 2) pass on any cost increase to consumers. A major empirical challenge is that firms endogenously decide whether to operate a CHP plant or not. Two different matching procedures are used to circumvent this problem. The results show that 1) compared with a similar non-CHP firm, the average CHP firm reports a DH cost that is 20-25% higher, 2) the extra cost that CHP firms report is fully passed on to consumers and 3) with reported costs, the price-cost margin is 8% for both groups and with imputed costs the margin increases to 30-35% for the CHP firms. The results are consistent with the presence of strategic cost shifting, which can be tackled through either stricter accounting rules or DH price regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We study opportunity cost neglect in public policy and private consumption. • We conduct preregistered experiments with both members of the public and experts. • We find strong evidence of opportunity cost neglect in public policy. • We find no evidence of opportunity cost neglect in private consumption. • Opportunity cost neglect creates artificially high demand for public spending. Opportunity cost is the foregone benefit of options not chosen. If opportunity costs are neglected in decisions about public policy, there is a high risk that the best options are overlooked. We study opportunity cost neglect in public policy in experiments with members of the general public in Sweden and international experts on priority setting in health care (n = 957). We find strong evidence of opportunity cost neglect in public policy, where participants who acted in the role of policy makers were between six and ten percentage points less likely to invest in a public health program when reminded about opportunity costs (money could fund other health programs). To our surprise, we failed to confirm an effect consistent with opportunity cost neglect in private consumption; but exploratory analyses revealed a substantial age effect that reconciles our findings with previous literature. Young participants showed opportunity cost neglect, while the effect was reversed for old participants. The implications of opportunity cost neglect for public policy are substantial, including misallocation of public resources and an artificially high demand for public spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although cost-effectiveness analysis has a long tradition of supporting healthcare decision-making in Sweden, there are no clear criteria for when an intervention is considered too expensive. In particular, the opportunity cost of healthcare resource use in terms of health forgone has not been investigated empirically. In this work, we therefore seek to estimate the marginal cost of a life year in Sweden's public healthcare sector using time series and panel data at the national and regional levels, respectively. We find that estimation using time series is unfeasible due to reversed causality. However, through panel instrumental variable estimation we are able to derive a marginal cost per life year of about SEK 370,000 (EUR 39,000). Although this estimate is in line with emerging evidence from other healthcare systems, it is associated with uncertainty, primarily due to the inherent difficulties of causal inference using aggregate observational data. The implications of these difficulties and related methodological issues are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses findings of a survey which investigated the willingness-to-pay of respondents to avoid delays at medical practices. Factors considered in the analysis of the demand and pricing of medical services include the opportunity cost of a patient's travel time and waiting time. Several countries where the health care system is nationalized and waiting lists and queues are considered norms include the Great Britain, Sweden and Canada.

This paper discusses how a practically used index for the cost of owner occupied housing can be interpreted and understood in a theoretical framework of user cost. The considerations particularly apply to the present treatment of owner occupied housing in the Swedish Consumer Price Index, and they show how the present method can be conceptually interpreted in comparison to a new recently proposed approach. The view suggested here may on the one hand explore possible motivations for the present Swedish method, and on the other hand highlight some of its deficiencies. In particular it is seen that the present index theoretically depends somewhat artificially on the duration of ownership of homes, but that under present practical conditions it appears to provide a reasonable approximation of the cost change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a bargaining approach to the modeling of the Swedish roundwood market. The market wherein the price level is fixed in this manner is, however, only a sub-market--although clearly the most important--which henceforth will be referred to as the proper roundwood market. Buyers within each market area can acquire roundwood in at least three additional ways. The direct cost of wood supplied from a firm's own forests is, as a rule, the cheapest, although the opportunity cost is higher. The list prices in the roundwood market are lower than the cost of standing timber for sale, and the most expensive wood is bought in the international market. The parties bargain simultaneously about both price and quantity. This assumption might seem inconsistent with the actual bargaining practice in the Swedish roundwood market, but clearly it would also be unrealistic to model the bargaining behavior as if the parties involved only bargained about price, without having the faintest idea about the resulting volumes.

Temporary no-take zones (NTZs) are increasingly introduced in Sweden as a fisheries management tool to restore populations of specific target species. This paper presents a cost-benefit analysis of two real case temporary NTZs closed during a 5–6 year period in the coastal zone of the Baltic Sea, using scenario analysis to account for uncertainty in both the biological and economic effects. A sensitivity analysis was added for certain key parameters. The results of the cost-benefit analyses for the two NTZs are positive in all scenarios relating to the most realistic case of no opportunity costs, i.e., assuming that all fishing activity could be relocated to adjacent areas without cost during the closed period. As an extreme case comparison, full opportunity costs were included, assuming that no fishing activity could be relocated to other areas during the closed period. One of the NTZs then exhibited a negative net result for most scenarios. For the other area the net result was positive even when the maximum opportunity costs of temporary lost fishing opportunities were included, largely depending on the strong positive change in the value of commercial fishing. By demonstrating potential costs and benefits of using temporary no-take zones in fisheries management this study may contribute to policy making, as well as to creating acceptance from stakeholder groups that incur short-term costs from closing areas to fishing. • Two temporary no-take zones in the Baltic Sea gave positive effects on target species. • Fisheries benefits outweighed costs when assuming that fisheries were relocated. • When assuming no fisheries were relocated, costs outweighed benefits in some scenarios. • Results may contribute to policy making and create acceptance from stakeholder groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]