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.
Public goods with price exclusion / Michael E. Burns and Cliff Walsh -- Free rider and bad wagons / Bengt-Arne Wickström -- Competitive lobbying for group-specific public goods / Rüdiger Pethig -- The MDP-procedure in a regional economy / Oskar von dem Hagen -- Distributive and allocative effects of individual voting behaviour / Horst Hanusch and Peter Biene -- Majority decisions on regional environmental quality and interregional pollution / Ferdi Dudenhöffer -- Environmental policy with pollution interaction / Alfred Endres -- Alternative allocation procedures for public goods / Wolfgang Blümel.
A wide-ranging survey of the theory and evidence on public goods, presenting the main literature on public goods, both theoretical and empirical, in a systematic manner. The breadth and depth of the book's coverage extends the existing literature in many ways.
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.
This second volume of the Handbook presents professional surveys of all the important topics in urban economics. The first section contains 6 surveys on locational analysis, the second, 5 surveys of specific urban markets, and the third part presents 5 surveys of government policy issues. The book brings together exhaustive research by distinguished scholars from many countries. It is the only complete survey volume of urban economics and should serve as a reference volume to scholars and graduate students for many years. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes
The world's agenda of international cooperation has changed. The conventional concerns of foreign affairs, international trade, and development assistance, are increasingly sharing the political center stage with a new set of issues. These include trans-border concerns such as global financial stability and market efficiency, risk of global climate change, bio-diversity conservation, control of resurgent and new communicable diseases, food safety, cyber crime and e-commerce, control of drug trafficking, and international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Globalization and increasing porosity of national borders have been key driving forces that have led to growing interdependence and interlocking of the public domains--and therefore, public policy concerns--of countries, governments, private businesses, civil society, and people at large. Thus, new and different issues are now occupying top places on national policy agendas, and consequently, on the agendas of international negotiating forums. The policy approaches to global challenges are also changing. A proliferation and diversification of international cooperation efforts include focus on financing arrangements. Financing of international cooperation in most instances is a haphazard and non-transparent process and often seems to run parallel to international negotiations. There are many unfunded mandates and many-non-mandatory funds. To agree on and to achieve international economic goals, we need to understand how financing of international cooperation efforts actually works. Our understanding is hampered by two gaps: 1) lack of an integrated and cohesive theoretical framework; 2) lack of consolidated empirical and operational knowledge in the form of a comprehensive inventory of past, current and possible future (i.e. currently deliberated) financing mechanisms. This book reduces these two gaps and provides a guide to improve our ability to finance international cooperation.
Public goods are typically defined only in reference to the good itself but, as this book argues, the public goods can be better understood if contextual variables are incorporated. This book discusses the production and provision of public goods. It asserts that changes related to public goods are better understood if the category of goods are not decided solely by the properties of the good itself. We also need to focus on how the enabled utility of a good is influenced by the production and the provision of the good. The book opens with a brief introduction to common conceptions of public goods and a review of the existing literature - highlighting the limitations of current definitions of public goods. It presents a new multi-layered approach to public goods. This has implications for the discourse on public goods and for our understanding of the societal and environmental impact of public goods. The implications are illustrated in several areas; public goods in ancient history, privatization, innovation, competitiveness and prices, democracy and political standards, and economic growth. The book provides a provocative argument for a new way to analyze public goods which will appeal to scholars and students interested in the economic analysis of public goods, arguments regarding the privatizing or nationalizing of production and services, and method of modelling and measuring sustainable business activities.
Presenting emphases on and approaches to issues such as government spending, reporting, pricing and fiscal federalism, the Handbook of Public Finance demonstrates the utility of integrating public finance theory with actual public policy practices. It discusses applications in major subfields of public finance, including public education, environmental regulation, energy policy, social welfare programs, and local and state politics. Other topics of discussion include the theory and practice of tax incidence analysis; the marginal costs of taxation and regulation, the economics of expenditure incidence, discounting and the social discount rate; passive use benefits, and public sector pricing.
Making, amending, and interpreting constitutions is a political game that can yield widespread suffering or secure a nation's liberty and prosperity. Given these high stakes, Robert Cooter argues that constitutional theory should trouble itself less with literary analysis and arguments over founders' intentions and focus much more on the real-world consequences of various constitutional provisions and choices. Pooling the best available theories from economics and political science, particularly those developed from game theory, Cooter's economic analysis of constitutions fundamentally recasts a field of growing interest and dramatic international importance. By uncovering the constitutional incentives that influence citizens, politicians, administrators, and judges, Cooter exposes fault lines in alternative forms of democracy: unitary versus federal states, deep administration versus many elections, parliamentary versus presidential systems, unicameral versus bicameral legislatures, common versus civil law, and liberty versus equality rights. Cooter applies an efficiency test to these alternatives, asking how far they satisfy the preferences of citizens for laws and public goods. To answer Cooter contrasts two types of democracy, which he defines as competitive government. The center of the political spectrum defeats the extremes in "median democracy," whereas representatives of all the citizens bargain over laws and public goods in "bargain democracy." Bargaining can realize all the gains from political trades, or bargaining can collapse into an unstable contest of redistribution. States plagued by instability and contests over redistribution should move towards median democracy by increasing transaction costs and reducing the power of the extremes. Specifically, promoting median versus bargain democracy involves promoting winner-take-all elections versus proportional representation, two parties versus multiple parties, referenda versus representative democracy, and special governments versus comprehensive governments. This innovative theory will have ramifications felt across national and disciplinary borders, and will be debated by a large audience, including the growing pool of economists interested in how law and politics shape economic policy, political scientists using game theory or specializing in constitutional law, and academic lawyers. The approach will also garner attention from students of political science, law, and economics, as well as policy makers working in and with new democracies where constitutions are being written and refined.
