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Local Public Goods (local + public_goods)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting100%

Selected Abstracts

Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India

ECONOMETRICA, Issue 5 2004
Raghabendra Chattopadhyay
This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders. [source]

PRINCIPLES AND THEORIES OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT

ECONOMIC AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2006
Peter A. Watt
The role of local government is viewed in the context of the overall role of government per se. A particular advantage of local government lies in its ability to arrange for the provision of local public goods in line with local tastes and preferences. A number of arguments suggest that local governments should be assigned adequate powers of local taxation to finance their expenditure responsibilities rather than having to rely on central government grant. [source]

Robust International Comparisons of Distributions of Disposable Income and Regional Public Goods

ECONOMICA, Issue 303 2009
NICOLAS GRAVEL
The paper provides robust normative comparisons of 12 OECD countries based on their distributions of disposable income and access to two regional public goods: infant mortality and pupil,teacher ratios at public schools. Comparisons are performed using two and three-dimensional dominance criteria that coincide with the unanimity of utilitarian judgments taken over specific classes of utility functions. The criteria succeed in ranking conclusively about 30% of all possible comparisons in the two-dimensional case, compared with 67% for one-dimensional income-based comparisons and 6% for three-dimensional ones. Introducing local public goods seems to worsen the relative standing of Anglo-Saxon countries. [source]

Political Competition in Weak States

ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2001
Eliana La Ferrara
In the developing areas, politics is often undemocratic, states lack a monopoly over violence, and politicians play upon cultural identities. To analyze politics in such settings, we develop a model in which politicians compete to build a revenue yielding constituency. Citizens occupy fixed locations and politicians seek to maximize rents. To secure revenues, politicians must incur the costs of providing local public goods and mobilizing security services. Citizens must participate, i.e. pay taxes; but can choose which leader to support. The model enables us to explore the impact of cultural identities and varying notions of military power. [source]

Interregional Disparities in Productivity and the Choice of Fiscal Regime

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 3 2009
KIMIKO TERAI
Two districts with divergent productivity levels engage in policy-making on the provision of local public goods that enhance future income and hence create a dynamic linkage across periods. The policy choices of district representatives are derived under alternative fiscal systems, and the relative merits of the systems are evaluated. It is predicted that a decentralized system is more likely to be selected in a more equal society. On the other hand, when a great deal of benefit spills over from a local public good, or when policy makers are expected to care solely about the immediate effects of their decisions on their districts, a centralized system is more likely to be selected. [source]

Efficient Allocations in Club Economies

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 1 2004
Marcus Berliant
We explore the characteristics of Pareto-optimal allocations in the context of local public goods or clubs. A set of first-order conditions for Pareto optimality is provided. Classical treatments apparently neglect an important term related to migrant compensation, and thus are incorrect. A Pareto optimum is shown to exist. [source]

Capitalising the Value of Free Schools: The Impact of Supply Characteristics and Uncertainty,

THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 499 2004
Paul Cheshire
This paper explores the sources and impact of variations of a given school quality at either primary or secondary level as capitalised into the price of houses. The results provide new evidence on the complex and subtle ways in which housing markets capitalise the value of local public goods such as school quality and suggest that this is highly nonlinear. We expect variation in the capitalised price according to the elasticity of supply of ,school quality' in the local market, the certainty with which that quality can be expected to be maintained and the suitability of the dwelling to accommodate children. [source]