Externalities and Public Expenditure Theory

by Buchanan, James M.

• ISBN13: 9780865972414
• ISBN10: 0865972419
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Liberty Fund

Summary

In his foreword, Geoffrey Brennan states, "The papers in this volume represent a coherent set of pieces focused on aspects of public-expenditure theory and constitute all of Buchanan's papers in this area." Buchanan's work on the subject of what governments should do and his insistence on Knut Wicksell's ideal that taxation and public expenditure be integrated topics have contributed significantly to the current thinking of most economists on the topic. Geoffrey Brennan summarises Buchanan's central themes in this way, "There are two messages that emerge from this work: one is that a proper sense of the extent of market failure, rather than its mere presence, is relevant in all cases; the other is that 'correcting' for such market failure is often a complex multidimensional business not captured by direct public provision at zero price and not necessarily involving expansion of market output." The twenty-nine papers represented in this volume are grouped into these major subject categories: public services and collective action, externalities, clubs and joint supply, public goods theory, applications -- city, health, and social security, distributive norms and collective action. This volume also includes what are arguably Buchanan's two most famous articles: 'Externality', which he wrote with William Stubblebine, and 'Economic Theory of Clubs'.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xi
Public Services and Collective Action
The Bases for Collective Action	3	(36)
The Evaluation of Public Services (Francesco Forte and James M. Buchanan)	39	(20)
``La scienza delle finanze'': The Italian Tradition in Fiscal Theory	59	(50)
Externalities
Externality	109	(17)
James M. Buchanan
Wm. Craig Stubblebine
Public and Private Interaction under Reciprocal Externality	126	(30)
James M. Buchanan
Gordon Tullock
External Diseconomies in Competitive Supply	156	(13)
Charles J. Goetz
James M. Buchanan
External Diseconomies, Corrective Taxes, and Market Structure	169	(5)
The Institutional Structure of Externality	174	(19)
Clubs and Joint Supply
An Economic Theory of Clubs	193	(17)
Joint Supply, Externality, and Optimality	210	(17)
Public Goods Theory
Cooperation and Conflict in Public-Goods Interaction	227	(17)
A Note on Public Goods Supply	244	(15)
James M. Buchanan
Milton Z. Kafoglis
Public Goods in Theory and Practice: A Note on the Minasian Samuelson Discussion	259	(6)
Breton and Weldon on Public Goods	265	(6)
Convexity Constraints in Public Goods Theory	271	(11)
James M. Buchanan
Antonio S. Pinto Barbosa
Public Goods and Natural Liberty	282	(19)
Applications-City, Health, and Social Security
Public Goods and Public Bads	301	(20)
Principles of Urban Fiscal Strategy	321	(19)
The Inconsistencies of the National Health Service	340	(21)
Technological Determinism Depite the Reality of Scarcity: A Neglected Element in the Theory of Spending for Medical and Health Care	361	(15)
The Budgetary Politics of Social Security	376	(14)
Social Security Survival: A Public-Choice Perspective	390	(17)
Social Insurance in a Growing Economy: A Proposal for Radical Reform	407	(14)
Commentary	421	(6)
Distributive Norms and Collective Action
What Kind of Redistribution Do We Want?	427	(7)
Distributive and Redistributive Norms: A Note of Clarification	434	(6)
Government Transfer Spending	440	(20)
Who Should Pay for Common-Access Facilities?	460	(11)
Who Should Distribute What in a Federal System?	471	(20)
Name Index	491	(4)
Subject Index	495