Nico van der Windt

• Erasmus University Rotterdam

This synthesis report is based on the reports of the evaluation of five projects that were co-financed by the Sustainable Water Fund (or FDW, for its Dutch abbreviation): two projects in Ethiopia, two in Ghana and one in Colombia. These evaluations were conducted by researchers of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Bayreuth and RWI...

The external evaluation of the development-relevant infrastructure development programme ORIO assessed its achievements so far. Its main objectives were:  to determine the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, additionality and policy coherence of the ORIO programme;  to learn from the assessment of the functioning and effects of the ORIO progra...

This external evaluation commissioned by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency reflected on, and provided input for adjustment of, the approach of CBI - the centre for the promotion of imports from developing countries. Its main purpose was therefore to determine a series of lessons and recommendations for the future. It covered three regional Integrat...

This independent evaluation study commissioned by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The evaluation assessed the relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of the PUM programme, as well as the improvement of it's monitoring and evaluation system and the adequacy of available management information for monitoring and evaluation purposes. PUM...

The war in the Balkans during the 1990s had a devastating impact on the population and on their livelihood, including housing. The cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Kosovo provide vivid illustrations.

Introduction Beauty Contests are very common in the procurement of goods and services in the public and private sectors. The public sector has also frequently used Beauty Contests for allocating rights to the private sector to produce goods and services, such as the right to exploit radio frequencies for several purposes or the right to exploit rai...

The main purpose of this paper is to be of assistance in understanding the working of the AEAF model. To this end we will explain in section 2 how in the simulations levels and percentages changes are treated as well as the important difference between stocks and flows. Section 3 deals with the consequences of linking the block of the real sector w...

Economic models can be extremely useful in the process of economic policy making. At the same time it should be emphasised that economic models should never be seen as a panacea for solving all kinds of economic problems. This paper discusses to what extent economic models could act as a useful tool in order to improve the quality in the process of...

With the current worldwide move from plan to market, questions about governance and culture have come to the forefront of debates on development.64 It is natural to think that the “habits of the heart” embodied in one’s own institutions are worth emulating by others, particularly if these habits and institutions have been conjoined with the materia...

Determinants of economic growth: An overview Thijs de Ruyter van Steveninck, Nico van der Windt, and Maaike Oosterbaan Netherlands Economic Institute What causes economic growth? Why have some countries grown much faster than others? Why do some countries not grow at all, or even experience negative (per capita) growth rates? What can governments d...

In less developed countries (LDCs) there is considerable concern that the developments in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) may lead to a more inward looking European Union (EU). As EU trade, foreign investment and aid flows are diverted from LDCs towards the CEECs, close neighbours of the EU, a new dimension would be added to 'for...

During 1989–90 radical political changes in the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) marked the start of a transformation of their economies from centrally-planned to market-oriented. In most of these countries a more liberal trade regime was introduced and closer relations with the European Union (EU) were sought. In the constellation of...

Full optimal stochastic control is not generally a feasible decision technique in economics because of the dimensionality and nonlinearity of the integrations involved, and because of the inseparability of the deterministic and stochastic components of the decision variables. Nevertheless, despite some suboptimality due to linearisation errors, the...

A modification of optimal control for an economy under uncertainty, by splitting the technique into a simulation phase and a control phase, makes policy optimization feasible for large-scale nonlinear models. The advantages of this approach in a policy search are clearly illustrated by an application to Dutch economic planning. A historical analysi...

This article studies the causes of the deterioration of the Dutch economy after 1930 and after 1973 and potential remedies. An originally Keynesian model from the Central Planning Bureau is extended with some crucial financial feedbacks. Foreign factors and restrictive policy explain the bulk of unemployment growth in the 1930's; the opposite holds...

In the course of 2002 up to the end of 2007, very steep growth of oil prices, but no remarkable slowdown of either the world economy or the Czech economy, was observed. This phenomenon raises a question about the impact of oil prices on modern economies. Analyzing the available data we can conclude that notwithstanding the full dependence of the Cz...