The book is the first of its kind to provide a comparative analysis of the provision of social and public services in France, Italy, Germany, the UK and Norway. This volume, co-authored by leading national experts, topically examines whether, when, how and why the delivery of social and public services, which was historically a responsibility of local authorities, has been significantly shifted to marketized and commodified forms. However, despite this considerable change, there have been recent indications of remunicipalisation in some sectors. Combining both cross-country and cross-policy co.
Local Provision of Public Services: The Tiebout Model after Twenty-Five Years describes several theoretical and empirical branches of economic research related to Charles Tiebout's provocative hypothesis that consumer mobility and interjurisdictional competition result in an efficient allocation of resources to the local public sector. The book provides insights on the issues being considered in policy debates regarding the appropriate means of providing essential public services. Chapters in the book include an overview of the Tiebout model; income redistribution in a federal system; empirical relationships in the political economy of local public finance; and two conflicting views of the incidence of the property tax. Economists, local government leaders, and experts in public finance will find the book very insightful.
Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both over time and across space, we examine public bus service, which represents a standardized output for benchmarking the cost of local government service provision. There is significant dispersion across transit agencies in the operating cost per bus mile with the highest being more than three times as high as the lowest among top 20 largest cities by population. We estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Our analysis finds that the full privatizaton could result in cost savings of $5.7 billion in 2011 and that the gain in economic efficiency from more closely aligning bus fares with production costs would be worth at least half a billion dollars.
This open access book explores new research directions in social inequality and urban segregation. With the goal of fostering an ongoing dialogue between scholars in Europe and China, it brings together an impressive team of international researchers to shed light on the entwined processes of inequality and segregation, and the implications for urban development. Through a rich collection of empirical studies at the city, regional and national levels, the book explores the impact of migration on cities, the related problems of social and spatial segregation, and the ramifications for policy reform. While the literature on both segregation and inequality has traditionally been dominated by European and North American studies, there is growing interest in these issues in the Chinese context. Economic liberalization, rapid industrial restructuring, the enormous growth of cities, and internal migration, have all reshaped the country profoundly. What have we learned from the European and North American experience of segregation and inequality, and what insights can be gleaned to inform the bourgeoning interest in these issues in the Chinese context? How is China different, both in terms of the nature and the consequences of segregation inequality, and what are the implications for future research and policy? Given the continued rise of China’s significance in the world, and its recent declaration of war on poverty, this book offers a timely contribution to scholarship, identifying the core insights to be learned from existing research, and providing important guidance on future directions for policy makers and researchers.
Originally published in 1984. The authors of this study address a number of major themes related to the analysis of public services: the role of public choice theory, the importance of professors and organisations, the value of neo-Marxist theories and the importance of space. These issues are considered in the context of case studies of school closures, the provision of medical care, the relationships between Federal outlays and presidential politics, the provision of nurseries, demand-making in local government and the fiscal crisis facing many American cities. The subject of public service provision is of great interest not only to political scientists but also to geographers and to sociologists. This book presents a great deal of new thinking and new research from both North America and Britain.
Who and what a government taxes, and how the government spends the money collected, are questions of primary concern to governments large and small, national and local. When public revenues pay for high-quality infrastructure and social services, citizens thrive and crises are averted. When public revenues are inadequate to provide those goods, inequality thrives and communities can verge into unrest—as evidenced by the riots during Greece’s financial meltdown and by the needless loss of life in Haiti’s collapse in the wake of the earthquake. In The Public Good and the Brazilian State, Anne G. Hanley assembles an economic history of public revenues as they developed in nineteenth-century Brazil. Specifically, Hanley investigates the financial life of the municipality—a district comparable to the county in the United States—to understand how the local state organized and prioritized the provision of public services, what revenues paid for those services, and what happened when the revenues collected failed to satisfy local needs. Through detailed analyses of municipal ordinances, mayoral reports, citizen complaints, and financial documents, Hanley sheds light on the evolution of public finance and its effect on the early economic development of Brazilian society. This deeply researched book offers valuable insights for anyone seeking to better understand how municipal finance informs histories of inequality and underdevelopment.
Abstract: This paper discusses decentralization (administrative, fiscal and political) of government in public service provision. It aims to facilitate understanding among practitioners, policy makers, and scholars about what decentralization entails in practice compared to theory. A review of the empirical literature and experience of decentralization is presented. The paper highlights issues that policy makers in developing and transitional countries should be aware of when reforming government, considering their unique political and economic environment. The author argues that decentralization produces efficiency gains stemming from inter-jurisdictional competition, enhanced checks and balances over the government through voting at the subnational level, and informational advantages due to proximity to citizens. By contrast, arguments against decentralization include the risk of an increased level of corruption, coordination problems stemming from multiple layers of government, low capacity of subnational government, and unproductive inter-jurisdictional competition. Decentralization itself does not render increased government effectiveness in public service provision. Instead, the effectiveness of government largely depends on the quality of human capital and institutions.
