A Political Economy of Canadian Broadcasting: Public Good versus Private Profit . David Skinner

The extent to which Federal agencies may properly engage in information dissemination activities is currently an issue of debate within the public and private sectors. Related to this is the question of how Federal agencies should price their information products and services. These issues, although they involve information activities in many spheres, are discussed with specific reference to the policies and practices of the National Library of Medicine.

Funding higher education has increasingly become a paradox for many nation states. The paradox rests with the recognition that the nation state acknowledges that university education has long-term benefits for the state with a better educated society, an increased opportunity to provide an innovative, creative and high technology work force for economic growth. Against this foil is the global austerity facing many countries, challenging the state to reduce the fiscal debt. The article seeks a ‘third way’ through the paradox using a dialectic argument.

Between public good and private profit: a history of corporate social responsibility in the twentieth century

The Pure Theory of Government Finance: A Suggested Approach

The Lighthouse in Economics

Iceland is known to men as a land of volcanoes, geysers and glaciers. But it ought to be no less interesting to the student of history as the birthplace of a brilliant literature in poetry and prose, and as the home of a people who have maintained for many centuries a high level of intellectual cultivation. It is an almost unique instance of a community whose culture and creative power flourished independently of any favouring material conditions, and indeed under conditions in the highest degree unfavourable. Nor ought it to be less interesting to the student of politics and laws as having produced a Constitution unlike any other whereof records remain, and a body of law so elaborate and complex, that it is hard to believe that it existed among men whose chief occupation was to kill one another.

These words spoken by a Canadian Prime Minister over fifty years ago capture the political principles, cultural paradoxes and technological bias which typify Canadian broadcasting to this day. On the one hand, there is commitment to the principle of political sovereignty over culture; on the other, there is dedication to the principle of consumer sovereignty over listener and viewer choice. As the system evolved through successive new technologies from terrestrial radio to extra-terrestrial satellites, the significance of these opposing concepts for Canada ‘s broadcasting economy has proven a rich source of public debate- and private profit- to politicians, cultural nationalists and entrepreneurs alike.

Although he was one of the major philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith (1723–1790) is today best known for his work in political economy, notably his An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations. Other writers had developed the laissez-faire theory that government should leave people alone in the economic marketplace, but Smith provided the most thorough and influential defense of this doctrine.

The inception of sports betting in Kenya has brought forth great excitement to prospective bettors and shrewd betting operators which has resulted in an equal amount of controversy and muddle. This note seeks to address the conflict between the private profit that investors and the economy reap, and the public good that the state owes its citizens by virtue of its fiduciary duty over its people. The author scrutinises the current law of sports betting in Kenya to demonstrate that it is not sufficient to speak to the two conflicting issues and that a concession is possible.

Over two decades ago, Charles Tiebout conjectured that in economies with local public goods, consumers vote with their feet and that this voting creates an approximate market-type equilibrium. He hypothesized that this approximate equilibrium is and, the smaller the moving costs, the closer the equilibrium is to an optimum. This paper provides a formal model of an economy with a local public good and endogenous jurisdiction structures (partitions of the set of agents into jurisdictions) which permits proofs of Tiebout's conjectures. Analogues of classical results pertaining to private-good economies, such as existence of equilibrium and convergence of the core to equilibrium states of the economy, are obtained for the approximate equilibrium and approximate cores. IN HIS SEMINAL PAPER Charles Tiebout [12] argued that the movement of consumers to jurisdictions where their wants are best satisfied, subject to their budget constraints and given (lump sum) taxes within jurisdictions, would lead to near optimal provision of a local public good. In addition, he hypothesized that the larger the economy and the number of jurisdictions and the smaller the moving costs, the nearer the equilibrium would be to an state of the economy. This paper provides proofs of Tiebout's conjectures for local public good economies with endogenous jurisdiction structures (partitions of the set of agents into jurisdictions). An E-core, similar to the Shapley-Shubik weak E-core (in [10]), is defined and it is shown that the E-core is non-empty for all sufficiently large economies. For small E and large economies, points in the E -core have the property that the utilities of consumers are nearly equal to the utilities they would realize at a point in the core of an associated economy with a non-empty core (an economy where agents can be appropriately partitioned into jurisdictions); informally, the E-core shrinks to the core. An E-equilibrium is defined and shown to be in the E -core; therefore, for small E, the E -equilibrium states of the economy are Pareto optimal. In addition, for small E, an s-equilibrium has the properties that: the utilities of consumers are nearly 2 equal to their utilities in a local public equilibrium allocation; and the lump sum taxes paid by most consumers are equal to the Lindahl prices times the quantities consumed of the local public good minus profit shares (the profit shares consumers nearly receive are the per capita profits in local public good

The Public Good and the Brazilian State: Municipal Finance and Public Services in São Paulo, 1822–1930

EVER since A. C. Pigou wrote his books on "welfare,"' a divergence between private and social costs has provided the main argument for instituting government action to correct allegedly inefficient market activities. The analysis in such cases has been designed less to aid our understanding of how the economic system operates than to find flaws in it to justify policy recommendations. Both to illustrate the argument and to demonstrate the nature of the actual situation, the quest has been for real-world examples of such defects.

What determines the type and quantity of overseas aid given by individual donor countries? Answers to this question in the existing literature are polarized into two groups. One of them offers a theoretical treatment based on the theory of public goods which is not consistent with the available data, and the other offers empirical correlations without any explanatory theory. The first group-for example, Pincus and Olson and Zeckhauser-treats aid, like defense, as an "international public good." Small countries, on this approach, are free riders, spending relatively little themselves while deriving benefits from the expenditures of larger countries.' But this approach is not consistent with even a casual scrutiny of the OECD aid community in which, broadly speaking, the smallest countries are the most generous donors.2 The second group-for example, Hoadley and Beenstockdiscover correlations between a country's ratio of aid to GNP and certain independent variables which may be expected to influence it (e.g., that country's GNP, its dependence on foreign trade, its government's position in the ideological spectrum, and the state of the domestic economy).3 However, these findings are not fitted into any theoretical framework, so that it is difficult to work out what they really mean.4 The approach of this paper is to treat foreign aid as a public good for which there is a market, albeit a highly imperfect one because the consumers-donor country taxpayers-are ignorant about the very nature, let alone the price, of the commodity they are buying. On this view, factors on the demand side (i.e., taxpayers' response to their country's aid program) will help to determine the quantity of aid disbursed as well as factors on the supply side such as the donor government's desire to obtain strategic or trading benefits from aid. This view

Purpose The article highlights the significance of the centre-(semi-)peripheries dynamics in the co-construction of global public goods and the limits of openness in global knowledge production. Challenging the assumption of global public good is not to discount the benefits of openness, but rather to initiate a conversation about the political economy, regionalism and internationalism of global knowledge production. Design/methodology/approach By examining “information/knowledge as a public good” and historical incidents where information flows were expedited and prohibited, this article shows that the public good justification for openness demands further examination. Findings First, although intangible information is inherently a public good, publicly funded research outputs are tangible information and they are not necessarily qualified as public goods. Second, intellectual property rights and private ownership can be conducive to the creation of public goods. Third, openness can become a convenient slogan for commercial interests or national priorities without regard to common or public good. Furthermore, national borders, international relations and geopolitical tensions can slow and stop transnational information flows because not every kinds of information are permitted to be global public goods. Originality/value The paper considers some assumptions of openness that have been overlooked or understudied in the context of global knowledge production.

Essays in Political Economy