However, we must bear in mind that there are falling school rolls and diseconomies of scale.
The pupil-teacher ratio is at a record level, yet there are diseconomies in the falling school rolls.
Especially by the 1960s and 1970s, as awareness of the costs of industrial pollution mounted, scale diseconomies figured more prominently as a motivation for industrial decentralisation.
Recent economic research, for example, underscores the anti-growth effects of a legacy of high inequality in the distribution of productive assets and the concentration of farms with diseconomies of scale.
In addition, industrial decentralisation would enhance the efficiency of the economy if there were spatial diseconomies of scale (such as pollution or congestion) associated with existing concentrations of industry.
Based on the household-size optimality theory, there may also be decreasing marginal economies of scale as household size increases, turning to diseconomies of scale at some point.
However, the diseconomies of raising children in two post-separation households that this article has highlighted raise significant doubts about the realism, fairness and efficacy of such an approach.
Cocoa, it seems, is not subject to economies of scale and may in fact be subject to diseconomies of scale.
