When rights and obligations are not recognized as assets and liabilities on a government’s balance sheet, the government’s deficit can be reduced by selling off-balance-sheet assets or incurring off-balance-sheet liabilities. This paper examines how much progress has been made in recognizing assets and liabilities and thus dispelling the fiscal illusions that such transactions create. Looking at the accounts, government-finance statistics, and long-term fiscal projections produced in 28 advanced economies in the period since 2003, it finds good progress in the recognition of some assets and liabilities, such as accounts payable and simple financial assets, but much less in others, such as civil-service pensions.
This book is a bold prescription for local government reform that moves well beyond the old arguments regarding consolidations (also referred to as amalgamations) and co-operation (sometimes referred to as shared services) to paint a picture of an efficient, effective tier of government that strikes a balance between the right of persons to pursue their existential ends and the need to promote the common good. The book presents a system of local government that balances human dignity with the common good, restrains Leviathan, provides a voice for the disenfranchised (and even the disinterested), and delivers goods and services efficiently and effectively. Ironically, what is often argued to be the weakness of local government in many jurisdictions – the fact that it is merely a creature of statute – is also the best hope we have of making the oft cited rhetoric about how ‘local government is the closest to the people that serves the people best’ become reality.
This book explores how taxation is related to the role of the state and its relationship with its constituents, the concept of private property rights, the concepts of societal fairness and justice, and the battle between the individual and the collective. This book appeals to students and scholars who want to know how philosophers in the past and present think about taxation, and how their thinking has developed through cross-influencing. There exists no comprehensive study providing such an overview. This book is a foundational study on the philosophical justification of taxation (qualitative aspect) and the normative qualifications required of tax law to constitute tax that is just and fair (distributive or quantitative aspect). The latter includes evaluation of what type of tax is morally correct or acceptable to realize distributive justice. This book covers periods from the Enlightenment era until the present. The philosophers are grouped together in schools of thought and each chapter except for chapter 1 and chapter 13, are is dedicated to a specific philosophical school. Moreover, this book aims to provide an overview of each school of thinking and the individual philosophers, including placing them in the context of their times. The book has particular importance as the study of taxation is an underdeveloped area of political and legal philosophy.
Recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics, James Buchanan has won international recognition for his pioneering role in the development of public-choice theory. Among his works that the prize committee specifically cited was Public Finance in Democratic Process, which first appeared in 1967. As James C. Miller, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, notes in his foreword, "This book is perhaps the best compact exposition of Buchanan's theory of public choice."
Price theory has provided solutions to myriad problems affecting society without invoking any precepts beyond those encapsulated in the standard economic postulate. Fiscal theory, meanwhile, has been closely attentive to the political, sociological and historical circumstances that bear upon the fiscal act. This methodological duality has resulted in the development of fiscal theory in line with the political culture espoused by its originator, usually the one prevailing at home. Thus emerges the need for an analysis of the evolution of fiscal thought along national lines.
Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for all countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition and a health economist take on this challenge. This 2001 book offers health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn consistently from a set of explicit guiding principles. After discussing sector-specific characteristics, lessons of international experience, and the main set of initial conditions, the authors advocate reforms based on organized public financing for basic care, private financing for supplementary care, pluralistic delivery of services, and managed competition. Policymakers need to achieve a balance, both assuring social solidarity through universal access to basic health services and expanding individual choice and responsibility through voluntary supplemental insurance. The authors also consider the problems that undermine effectiveness of market-based competition in the health sector.
How and why has government gotten bigger? “Should be a compulsory assignment for any seminar on modern political culture.” —The Journal of American History American government has evolved over the generations since the mid-nineteenth century. The changing character of these institutions is a critical part of the history of the United States. This engaging survey focuses on the evolution of public policy and its relationship to the constitutional and political structure of government at the federal, state, and local levels. A new chapter in this revised and updated edition also examines the debate about “big government” in recent decades. “A marvelous multidisciplinary synthesis that builds on the findings of historians of national, state, and local government, along with those of economists and political scientists, to provide a coherent account of the rise of modern American governing structures.” —Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Studies of public finance, as traditionally developed, have analyzed the effects of fiscal institutions on the market-choice behavior of individuals and firms, but this book takes a different approach. It analyzes the effects of fiscal institutions on the political-choice behavior of individuals as they participate variously in the decision-making processes of democracies. What effect will the form of a new tax have on individuals' attitudes toward more or less public spending? To what extent does the private sector--public sector mix depend on the way in which tax payments are made? How do the various taxes affect the fiscal consciousness of individual citizens? These are questions that have been ignored for the most part. They are, nonetheless, important and worthy of examination. This book is an attempt to provide some provisional answers. By the use of simplified models of existing tax institutions, Buchanan predicts the effects that these exert on individual behavior in the area of political choice. The relative effects of direct and indirect taxes, the "old tax--new tax" distinction, the effects of fiscal earmarking, the effects of unbalanced budgets -- these are a few of the topics examined. Before these questions can be fully answered, research must be conducted to find out just how much individuals know about the taxes they pay and the benefits they receive. Comparatively little research of this kind has been completed, but the author devotes a chapter to a careful review of the present state of this sort of research. Individuals' choice among alternative fiscal institutions is examined in the second part of the book. If given the opportunity, how would the individual choose to pay his or her taxes? Progressive income taxes, excise taxes, and public debt are analyzed in terms of this question. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this imaginative study will be of interest to both economists and political scientists.
This dissertation consists of four distinct essays. In an essay entitled "Claim Timing and Ex Post Adverse Selection: Evidence from Dental 'Insurance, ' " I explore the impact of strategic timing on insurance market allocations. If people can delay a claim just long enough to buy more insurance coverage in anticipation of it, severe adverse selection may result, and in extreme cases, this can lead to the complete unraveling of an insurance market. I study these forces by analyzing dental treatments and insurance, with the goal of understanding insurance in the market for dental care and also revealing lessons that apply to insurance markets more broadly. Using rich claim-level data from a large firm, my analysis reveals that the strategic delay of treatment and the associated adverse selection may be an important factor in explaining why so few people have dental coverage in the US and why typical dental "insurance" contracts provide so little insurance. More generally, my results suggest that insurance products without contract features designed to limit coverage for strategically delayed costs (e.g., open-enrollment periods, pricing pre-existing conditions) may generate unraveling. An essay entitled "The Hated Property Tax: Salience, Tax Rates, and Tax Revolts" (with Caroline Hoxby), explores the relationship between the salience of the property tax and observed property tax rates. We hypothesize that high salience explains the unpopularity of the property tax, the level of the property tax, and prevalence of property tax revolts. To identify variation in the salience of the property tax over local jurisdictions and over time, we exploit conditionally random variation in tax escrow, a method of paying the property tax that makes it much less salient. We find that areas in which the property tax is less salient are areas in which property taxes are higher and property tax revolts are less likely to occur. In an essay entitled "Private Coverage and Public Costs: Identifying the Effect of Private Supplemental Insurance on Medicare Spending" (with Neale Mahoney), we explore the impact of private supplemental insurance on Medicare spending. Private supplemental insurance to "fill the gaps" of Medicare, known as Medigap, is very popular. We estimate the impact of this supplemental insurance on total medical spending using an instrumental variables strategy that leverages discontinuities in Medigap premiums at state boundaries. Our estimates suggest that Medigap increases medical spending by 57 percent---or about 40 percent more than previous estimates suggest. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that a 20 percent tax on premiums would generate combined revenue and savings of 6.2 percent of Medicare baseline costs. An essay entitled "The Effect of Insurance Coverage on Preventive Care" (with Mark Cullen), explores the effect of insurance coverage on preventive care utilization. Using health insurance claims data from a large company, this paper examines the implementation of an insurance benefit design which differentially increased the marginal price of curative care (non-preventive care) while decreasing the marginal price of prevention. We examine the effect of the differential price change on the use of preventive procedures. We reveal evidence consistent with an important negative cross-price effect; that is, increases in the price of curative care can depress preventive care utilization.
