Investment In Public Goods Research Articles

Homicides, Public Goods, and Population Health in the Context of High Urban Violence Rates in Cali, Colombia.

Obesity and frequent mental and physical distress are often associated with major health problems. The characteristics of the urban environment, such as homicide rates and public goods provision, play an important role in influencing participation in physical activity and in overall mental health. This study aimed to determine whether there was a relationship between homicide rates and public goods provision on the health outcomes of the citizens of Cali, Colombia, a city known for its high urban violence rate and low municipal investment in public goods. We used a linear probability model to relate homicide rates and public goods provision (lighted parks, effective public space per inhabitant, and bus stations) at the district level to health outcomes (obesity and frequent mental and physical distress). Individual data were obtained from the 2014 CaliBRANDO survey, and urban context characteristics were obtained from official government statistics. After controlling for individual covariates, results showed that homicide rates were a risk factor in all examined outcomes. An increase in 1.0m2 of public space per inhabitant reduced the probability of an individual being obese or overweight by 0.2% (95% confidence interval (CI)=-0.004 to -0.001) and the probability of frequent physical distress by 0.1% (95% CI=-0.002 to -0.001). On average, the presence of one additional bus station increased the probability of being obese or overweight by 1.1%, the probability of frequent mental distress by 0.3% (95% CI=0.001-0.004), and the probability of frequent physical distress by 0.02% (95% CI=0.000-0.003). Living in districts with adequate public space and lighted parks lowers the probability of being obese and high homicide rates, which are correlated with poor health outcomes in Cali, Colombia. Investments in public goods provision and urban safety to reduce obesity rates may contribute to a better quality of life for the population.

Land use, worker heterogeneity and welfare benefits of public goods

We show that investments in public goods change the optimal land use in their vicinity, leading to additional welfare benefits. This occurs through two sorting mechanisms. First, availability of public goods leads to higher population densities. Second, population groups sort according to their preferences for public goods. We develop a structural spatial general equilibrium model that accounts for these effects. The model is estimated using data on transport infrastructure, commuting behaviour, land use and land rents for some 3000 ZIP-codes in the Netherlands and for three levels of education. Welfare benefits of investments in public transport infrastructure are shown to differ sharply by workers’ educational attainment. Welfare gains from changes in land use account for up to 30% of the total benefits of a transport investment.

The price of austerity: Vital politics and the struggle for public water in southern Italy

This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods – including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement’s campaign of ‘civil obedience’ – an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just the volatile price of a vital good. It argues that these ‘vital politics’ of citizen price‐setting are a form of valuation emerging from below, an anti‐financialization emerging in our era of predatory finance.

Jeremy Rifkin’s utopia of the economy of abundance

The article is a voice in the discussion on the directions of the evolution of the global economy. The reference plane is a reflection J. Rifkin's book titled: The Zero marginal Cost Society. The article critically analyzed some of the assumptions and conclusions contained in the work of Rifkin. The main topics of discussion included the reality of such principles as the need to reduce the human population, or total elimination of intellectual property rights. On the other hand, the dubious trends was inter alia dominance of communities production in the world economy already about half the twenty-first century. Also pointed to issues relevant to the future development strategies completely omitted in the work of Rifkin.

When Do Leaders Free-Ride? Business Experience and Contributions to Collective Defense

The logic of free-riding expects that individuals will under-invest in public goods, but people often behave in ways that are inconsistent with this prediction. Why do we observe variation in free-riding behavior? This study addresses this question by examining contributions to an important international public good - collective defense in military alliances. It develops a behavioral theory of free-riding in which the beliefs of world leaders are important for explaining investments in public goods. The argument holds that leaders with business experience make smaller contributions to collective defense because they are egoistic and more comfortable relying on a powerful ally for their defense. An analysis of defense expenditures in 17 non-US members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from 1952 to 2014 provides evidence consistent with the theory. The findings suggest that leaders with business experience are more likely than other heads of government to act as self-interested utility maximizers.

Explaining popular participation in India’s local democracy: Some lessons from panchayats in West Bengal

ABSTRACTThe 73rd amendment to the Indian Constitution launched an extensive experiment in local democracy. Based on a study of 2,794 gram panchayats and field observations in West Bengal, this article examines when and why popular participation in panchayat elections—the most basic and visible aspect of local democracy—differs across local governments. The study finds that gram panchayats witness high levels of participation when they pursue policies that benefit the villagers, such as greater investment in education, and when they are seemingly less corrupt. Investment in public goods and lower rents are known to promote economic development and general welfare. In addition to these familiar implications, this study shows how these policies also have political consequences for democracy in India.

Fragility of the provision of local public goods to private and collective risks

Smallholder agricultural systems, strongly dependent on water resources and investments in shared infrastructure, make a significant contribution to food security in developing countries. These communities are being increasingly integrated into the global economy and are exposed to new global climate-related risks that may affect their willingness to cooperate in community-level collective action problems. We performed field experiments on public goods with private and collective risks in 118 small-scale rice-producing communities in four countries. Our results indicate that increasing the integration of those communities with the broader economic system is associated with lower investments in public goods when facing collective risks. These findings indicate that local public good provision may be negatively affected by collective risks, especially in communities more integrated with the market economy.

Sustainability and Well-Being: A Happy Synergy

The new science of ‘happiness’ is revolutionizing our ability to measure social progress. Factors such as meaningful relationships and a sense of purpose and belonging have been shown to be essential to human well-being; indeed, they contribute even more than income. The happiest societies foster dignity for all, in part through robust investment in public goods and a holistic approach to education. This converging body of research indicates that well-being and ecological sustainability, goals sometimes viewed as contradictory, are in fact complementary. Emphasizing social drivers of well-being counters the conventional focus on economic growth and fosters the pro-social attitudes and behaviors necessary to live in better balance with nature. Fortuitously, recent technological innovations that make knowledge and productive capacity widely available at little cost and promote creative and collaborative activity could facilitate a transition to a world of reduced environmental stress and enhanced human well-being. An affirmative vision of a future both resilient and fulfilling, rather one of dour work and sacrifice, should guide our way.

Impact of Public Goods on Economic Growth Gaps among Regions of China - from the Perspective of Public Finance

Based on the economic growth model of public expenditures, this paper assesses the contribution of public expenditures to economic growth among the East, Centre and West of China from 2007 to 2014. This paper attempts to explain the differences of the output per capita in these three regions from the perspective of disparities of investment in public goods determined by public finance and finds that public expenditures have effects on regional differences so that proper types of fiscal expenditures should be invested based on the regional economic characteristics.

Gender Differences for Public Good Contributions by Competitive versus Group Work Environments

Using a between-subjects design we compare the effect of competitive and cooperative work tasks in the lab on subsequent public good investments. We remove potential reciprocal behavior by having the work tasks occur with separate subjects outside the lab and a one-shot public good experiment with subjects in the lab. We find that individuals in cooperative (group pay) treatments contribute more than individuals in competitions, but these differences are entirely driven by female participants. Women contribute significantly less after competitive tasks and more after group pay tasks while men’s public good contributions are not significantly different. The difference is large for females who contribute 78% more after the group pay treatment compared to competitions. The results suggest that women are more affected by work environments than men and that competitive work environments lead women to contribute less to public goods even outside the workplace.

The sustainability of drinking water supply in rural China: Does the provision of drinking water investment mismatch the demand of residents?

It is doubted that the top down nature of investment planning may lead to mismatches between drinking water investment and the demands of local residents in rural China. Statistical and econometric analysis based on data of 2020 rural households from five Chinese provinces from 1998 to 2011 are used to illustrate the linkage between demand for drinking water investment and construction of drinking water projects. Household's demand significantly affects drinking water projects implemented by upper level governments and implemented jointly, but is not significant in explaining the projects implemented by village. There is evidence to suggest that the demands of local leaders override those of households in the implementation of drinking water projects provided by village in the early stage of 2005–2008. The situation improves in the latter stage of 2008–2011when the village level participatory bodies begin to provide opportunities for households to voice their preferences on public goods investment. The results of this study imply that it is important to explore appropriate regulations and policies that enabling local cadres to better meet local demands of their communities to ensure the sustainability of rural drinking water supply.

Subnational Variation in Electoral Accountability: Local Public Good Investments and Incumbent Support

Theories of democratic governance assume that citizens hold politicians accountable for their performance in providing public services. This study expands the existing debate by shifting its theoretical lens to subnational heterogeneity in satisfaction with government performance and incumbent support. Existing accounts suggest that local political and social contexts are likely to condition citizens’ perceptions of government performance. Since satisfaction with public services is driven not only by policy outcomes but also by the processes involved in decision making, the presence of stronger and denser voice and accountability mechanisms in small local units that increase citizens’ sense of the ability to influence local outcomes is likely to translate into higher satisfaction with government performance independent of the outcome itself. Using an original panel dataset containing detailed information on education and health investments and electoral outcomes in Turkey, I find that particularly health investments have a positive, yet delayed e↵ect on the vote share of the incumbent government. However, consistent with the theoretical expectations, this positive effect is limited only to small districts. A crucial contribution of this study is that the effect of public services on incumbent support is not uniform. By showing that local contexts may condition satisfaction with government performance, and thereby electoral outcomes, the study makes an important contribution to the literature on electoral behavior and distributive politics as well as governance and accountability.

Factors influencing the efficiency of rural public goods investments in mountainous areas of China —— Based on micro panel data from three periods

China’s countryside is undergoing massive transformation under the background of rapid urbanization and industrialization; however, urban-rural gaps and regional gaps have become obvious in this process. It is necessary to restructure rural production, living and ecological spaces by investing public goods appropriately, to thereby establish a new platform for building a new countryside and realize urban-rural integration development. Mountainous areas are an important type of human-land relationship system, but the levels of rural economic development and public services in mountainous areas are significantly lower than those in the plains. This paper examines 12 years of data from tracking surveys, adopts a method that combines economics and geography, and conducts dynamic monitoring and evaluations of the efficiency of rural public goods investments in specific mountainous areas. The results show that rural public infrastructure and public services in mountainous areas are increasingly valued and have received considerable support in terms of government financial contributions. Moreover, the burden of investments at the village level continues to decrease, the technical efficiency of rural public investments has risen to relatively high levels, and scale efficiency plays a crucial role in public investment efficiency. Furthermore, natural terrain, location and transportation remain significant factors that influence the efficiency of rural public investments in mountainous areas. However, village-level democratic systems and village governance have gradually become key factors that influence public investment efficiency. Based on such results, this research offers policy recommendations for increasing the efficiency of public fund usage and promoting rural restructuring.

Does Overconfidence Promote Cooperation? Experimental Evidence from a Threshold Public Goods Game

This paper studies the effects of two types of overconfidence — overestimation and overprecision — on investment in a public good in a two-person threshold public good game. Our experimental results show that the influence of overconfidence on investment in public goods crucially depends on the agents’ type of social preference. The marginal per capita return (MPCR) leads to a higher willingness to cooperate in conditional cooperators, but has little effect on the willingness of free-riders. The influence of overestimation on cooperation depends on the type of social preference that the agents have; overestimation leads to higher investment by conditional cooperators, but lower investment by free-riders. Finally, overprecision in general leads to higher investment by conditional cooperators, and tunes down the effect of changing MPCR on cooperation.

Cooperation and the common good.

In this paper, we draw the attention of biologists to a result from the economic literature, which suggests that when individuals are engaged in a communal activity of benefit to all, selection may favour cooperative sharing of resources even among non-relatives. Provided that group members all invest some resources in the public good, they should refrain from conflict over the division of these resources. The reason is that, given diminishing returns on investment in public and private goods, claiming (or ceding) a greater share of total resources only leads to the actor (or its competitors) investing more in the public good, such that the marginal costs and benefits of investment remain in balance. This cancels out any individual benefits of resource competition. We illustrate how this idea may be applied in the context of biparental care, using a sequential game in which parents first compete with one another over resources, and then choose how to allocate the resources they each obtain to care of their joint young (public good) versus their own survival and future reproductive success (private good). We show that when the two parents both invest in care to some extent, they should refrain from any conflict over the division of resources. The same effect can also support asymmetric outcomes in which one parent competes for resources and invests in care, whereas the other does not invest but refrains from competition. The fact that the caring parent gains higher fitness pay-offs at these equilibria suggests that abandoning a partner is not always to the latter's detriment, when the potential for resource competition is taken into account, but may instead be of benefit to the 'abandoned' mate.

Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox

Reviewed by: Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise by Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox Jay Bowman Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2015. 203 pp.; maps, diagrs., photos, notes, bibliog., and index. $27.00 paperback (ISBN 978-0801479649) Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox have written a fruitful book, based on fieldwork in Peru from 2005 to the present, which should be useful to a wide range of readers. Their book follows the conception, implementation, construction and aftermath of two major road projects. The first is the Interoceanic Highway, which runs from the southwest Andean highlands to the border with Brazil, and which has a political history stretching back to the 1920s; the second is a notably shorter stretch of road connecting two smaller Amazonian towns in the Northeast. Despite the wide range of academic traditions employed throughout the book, Harvey and Knox provide lucid descriptions of the literature on critical infrastructures and theory used in the study of infrastructure projects, and more importantly, its relevance to the case study and the study of infrastructure more widely. The nuance and clarity of their writing should make this book valuable to a wide ranging audience—civil engineers, Peru specialists and development scholars, geographers and scholars in cognate disciplines alike. There has been a wealth of new studies of infrastructure projects throughout the developing world. These studies have been taken up by geographers and similar fields (anthropology in the case of Harvey and Knox) because the impacts of new or failing infrastructures are theoretically productive in studying the interconnections between technological systems, social change and development. The theoretical significance of this scholarship is given more urgency by governmental decisions: the BRICs economic group (Brazil, Russia, India and China), alongside the World Bank, are currently pushing for large-scale infrastructure projects as public-goods investments in a time of global economic downturn. Of course, the agendas of global financial institutions do not automatically translate into newly initiated projects, and by focusing not on the “what” of these roads projects but on the “when,” Harvey and Knox deliver an impressive political anthropology of road building. Through rigorous mixed methodologies, Harvey and Knox puncture the modernist assumptions of command and control employed [End Page 368] by state leaders and international bankers. The inevitable complications of diverse terrain, public corruption and pre-existing webs of social connections along the route produce “gaps that exist between the intended effects of infrastructural projects and the way those intentions play out in actual practice” (p. 5). Political life, therefore, is the struggle through which these gaps are formed and manipulated. Part I of the book is a rich ethnography of the social life of the road projects. Taking locals’ aspirations seriously, Harvey and Knox demonstrate the immense importance these projects have for the lives of those living along the roadways. From dreams of new jobs, social and educational connections with the city, or an entire village that picks up and moves from a nearby riverbank to the road for easier shipping, the roads are transformative. The integrative potential of the roads, of course, confronts a hierarchy of existing interconnections, demonstrating through richly told stories how uneven development plays out in the lives the roads encounter. Part II of the book begins with the ways in which numbers are mobilized as “foundations for an epistemological engagement with the world” (p. 82). Harvey and Knox draw on scholars such as Verran (2001) and Lave (1988), who argue that the enumeration and categorization of the world by civil engineers does not represent a universal ideal of proper infrastructure construction. Instead, numbers are created within political, legal and technocratic spheres that allow for the transformation of the world, mobilizing “the material articulations of imagination, ideology, and social life” (quoting Anand, p. 5). The authors, therefore, are “interested in what numbers do, in the relationships they entail and the worlds they create” (p. 82). An arresting example of this is the $4 million, seven-volume ‘pre-feasibility study’ commissioned by the Ministry of Transport prior to authorization and the rewarding of contracts. Drawing from national regulations, World Bank data and international civil engineering...

Co-Financing Agreements and Reciprocity: When 'No Deal' is a Good Deal

Institutions for co-financing agreements often exist to encourage public good investment. Can such frameworks deliver maximal investment when agents are motivated by reciprocity? We demonstrate that indeed they can, but not in the way one might expect. If maximal investment is impossible in the absence of the institution and public good returns are high, then an agreement signed by all parties cannot lead to full investment. However, if all parties reject the co-financing agreement, then an informal deal to invest can lead to full investment. Agreement institutions may thus do more than just facilitate the signing of formal agreements; they may play a critical role in igniting informal cooperation underpinned by reciprocity.

Investment in public capital, distribution, and governance

How does the redistribution of income that a regime prescribes for society and the amount of public-good social-overhead investment it provides depend on the nature of that regime? And how do these infl uence said society’s productive success? Connections among these phenomena informed much of Mancur Olson’s (1982, 1991) life-work now so foundational to the literature on redistributive politics, economic growth/prosperity, and the nature of regimes. Still a transparent simple account of how the nature of a regime determines trade-offs between transfers and public capital investment can improve the foundations and clarify anomalies present in the literature. Here we elaborate a model to address these questions and we prove, contrary to received wisdom, that redistribution can reduce or actually and unexpectedly increase supplies of public overhead capital. Redistributive taxation reduces capital productivity, which incentivizes governments to supply less. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, redistribution can also so deplete the tax base that to offset some of the loss government will actually invest more in the way of public-overhead factor inputs than would a less redistributive regime of an otherwise comparable society.

Theft under Stalin: a property rights analysis

Recent work on dictatorship has focused on how repression is used by dictators to eradicate political opposition. This article examines evidence from one of the most important dictatorships of the twentieth century to suggest that this may tell only half the story. As Stalin's dictatorship progressed, repression was increasingly administered neither by the secret police nor the military—as in most dictatorships—but through the ordinary courts. The article proposes an explanation, one broadly consistent with Olson's hypothesis that Stalin was a ‘proprietary dictator’, an autocrat with a long time horizon who made major investments in public goods. Stalin's new form of property—‘socialist property'—was one such public good. To legitimize the new form of ownership, Stalin ruled that it should be enforced through the ordinary justice system, albeit initially with high levels of repression. The article also makes two further contributions. It shows, first, how Stalin's theft campaigns are a striking historical example of what happens when an unpopular law clashes with social norms, and of how it might backfire. Second, it demonstrates how, as property rights theorists would predict, the main objects of theft legislation are generic or homogeneous goods with few property attributes.

The Swedish lighthouse system 1650–1890: private versus public provision of public goods: Figure 1.

This paper uses the history of lighthouses in Sweden to discuss the relative roles of public and private productions of public goods in a developing economy. In Sweden, like in England, there were private lighthouses financed by light dues levied on ships calling at particular harbors. However, private provision generally played a marginal role in the expansion of sea safety arrangements. The provision of large-scale public goods in a developing economy such as Sweden relied on public, not private, provision. Merchants were willing to pay taxes in order to contribute to public sector investments in public goods.