Providing Public Goods Research Articles

When Should the Government Own the Physical Assets Needed to Provide Public Goods?

When Should the Government Own the Physical Assets Needed to Provide Public Goods?

Voluntary Participation in a Negotiation on Providing Public Goods and Renegotiation Opportunities

Voluntary Participation in a Negotiation on Providing Public Goods and Renegotiation Opportunities

Providing Public Goods in Rural America: The Role of the Professional Public Administrator

Rural local governments, similar to their larger and more urban counterparts, provide many of the public services their citizens encounter on a daily basis. As would be expected, most dedicate the majority of their expenditures to services such as road maintenance, fire protection, and a handful of administrative functions. Some, however, devote significant resources to a more robust collection that includes parks, cultural institutions, and public health programs, for example. Using data from rural governments in Wisconsin, this research examines public expenditures, with an emphasis on the role of the professional administrator and the degree to which the position is correlated with expenditures on public goods. While existing scholarship has examined overall expenditures, this research provides a more nuanced focus on nine specific expenditure categories. Results indicate that population, partisanship, county-level expenditures, and fiscal capacity are related to various expenditure categories, but the effect of the professional administrator is much more limited.

Different Approaches to Provide Public Goods from Private Sectors in Chinese Rural Areas

The dilemma of resource is a prominent problem in the current practice of public goods supply. How to improve the efficiency of public goods supply has aroused widespread attention. Generally, public goods are provided by government due to its free-rider problems. However, in some mountainous areas in China, some self-organized compounds voluntarily provide public goods to meet villagers’ demand. This unselfish behavior contradicts the common way of provision of public goods in China but has emerged and expanded in rural areas. To trace the root of these seemingly abnormal event, the essay finds that family ties, cultural and geographical factors contribute to private provision of public goods. In addition, Studies have found that organizing farmers is an important starting point for forming effective social connections. Compared with government, since the self-organized compounds are based on a network of social relations, private provision in rural areas achieves a relative low-cost supervision and efficient management. Economically speaking, the ‘clan culture background’ of villages can act as a supervision and punishment mechanism, avoiding problems such as mismatch between supply and demand, high transaction costs, and inefficient use of resources.

Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight

Failing to Provide Public Goods: Why the Afghan Army Did Not Fight

Discussion on How Government Can Provide Public Goods Better

Public goods are non-exclusive and non-competitive commodities. Because of this characteristic, the government has become the main body of providing public goods in most cases. However, at present, the government has problems such as low efficiency and waste of resources in the process of providing public goods. Based on the perspective of public choice theory, this article analyzes why government failures occur in the process of providing public goods, and proposes path reconstruction suggestions.

Expert Estimates of the Share of Agricultural Support that Compensates European Farmers for Providing Public Goods and Services

Evaluations of agri-environment support at the European level are still rare. We used an expert survey to examine agricultural support schemes in the EU, Norway and Switzerland in terms of the shares of the payments that compensate farmers and other recipients for the costs of providing services. Furthermore, we explored to which categories of ecosystem services the funding for agri-environment measures contributed according to the experts. For the agri-environment payments in the EU we found a mean estimate of ‘percent payment for services’ (PPS) of 72.3%. Expert age, type of organisation and disciplinary background systematically affected the individual estimates. Controlling the individual-level variation, the estimates differed significantly by measure objectives. Particularly high PPS estimates were found for organic farming and conservation related measures, while integrated production and more generic extensive management options were perceived to perform less well. The mean PPS estimate for the rural development programmes was 59.6% and that for single payments 16.8%. The results suggest that expert estimates of PPS may complement the evaluation of schemes at the national or regional level in cases where complex policy objectives prevent a comprehensive evaluation based on objective measures.

Why do Authoritarian Regimes Provide Public Goods? Policy Communities, External Shocks and Ideas in China’s Rural Social Policy Making

Recent research on authoritarian regimes argues that they provide public goods in order to prevent rebellion. This essay shows that the ‘threat of rebellion’ alone cannot explain Chinese party-state policies to extend public goods to rural residents in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of policy making, it argues that China’s one-party regime extended public goods to the rural population under the influence of ideas and policy options generated by policy communities of officials, researchers, international organisations and other actors. The party-state centre adopted and implemented these ideas and policy options when they provided solutions to external shocks and supported economic development goals. Explanations of policies and their outcomes in authoritarian political systems need to include not only ‘dictators’ but also other actors, and the ideas they generate.

Participation and Commitment in Voluntary Coalitions to Provide Public Goods

This paper reports experimental evidence on the voluntary formation of coalitions to provide a public good. Participation and commitment in a coalition are either exogenously imposed or endogenously determined by the players themselves. We find larger voluntary participation rates when commitments in the coalition are endogenously determined using a minimum contribution rule rather than exogenously determined. However, due to a trade‐off between participation and commitment, coalitions with voluntary participation are less effective in facilitating cooperation compared to when all players are forced to participate. This paper therefore confirms the rather pessimistic conclusions from coalition formation theories.

The Endogenous Formation of Coalitions to Provide Public Goods: Theory and Experimental Evidence

This paper examines the endogenous formation of coalitions that provide public goods in which players implement a minimum participation requirement before deciding whether to join. We demonstrate theoretically that payoff-maximizing players will vote to implement efficient participation requirements and these coalitions will form. However, we also demonstrate that if some players are averse to inequality they can cause inefficient outcomes. Inequality-averse players can limit free riding by implementing larger than efficient coalitions or by blocking efficient coalitions from forming. We test the theory with experimental methods and observe individual behavior and coalition formation consistent with a model of inequality-averse players.

On the Formation of Coalitions to Provide Public Goods – Experimental Evidence from the Lab

The provision of public goods often relies on voluntary contributions and cooperation. While most of the experimental literature focuses on individual contributions, many real-world problems involve the formation of institutions among subgroups (coalitions) of players. International agreements serve as one example. This paper experimentally tests theory on the formation of coalitions in different institutions and compares those to a voluntary contribution mechanism. The experiment confirms the rather pessimistic conclusions from the theory: only few players form a coalition when the institution prescribes the full internalization of mutual benefits of members. Contrary to theory, coalitions that try to reduce the free-riding incentives by requiring less provision from their members, do not attract additional members. Substantial efficiency gains occur, however, both along the extensive and intensive margin when coalition members can each suggest a minimum contribution level with the smallest common denominator being binding. The experiment thereby shows that the acceptance of institutions depends on how terms of coalitions are reached.

Providing Public Goods Under International Law: Of Openness and Enclosure

Providing Public Goods Under International Law: Of Openness and Enclosure

Accounting for Mother Nature: changing demands for her bounty

PARTONE PERSPECTIVES ON THE WEALTH OF NATURE I. Natural Amenities and Ecosystem Services: The Need for Additional Institutional Innovation 11 BY THOMAS MICHAEL POWER 2. Maximizing the Wealth of Nature: A Property Rights Approach 33 BY TERRY L. ANDERSON PARTTWO DEVOLUTION TO FACILITATE CHANGE 3. Institutional Reform for Public Lands? 53 BY DANIEL KEMMIS 4. The State of the Parks: Enhancing or Dissipating the Wealth of Nature? 73 BY HOLLY LIPPKE FRETWELL PARTTHREE PROPERTY RIGHTS TO FACILITATE CHANGE 5. Homegrown Property Rights for the Klamath Basin 95 BY TERRY L. ANDERSON AND LAURA E. HUGGINS 6. Fishing for Wealth in Coastal Fisheries 119 BY DONALD R. LEAL 7. The Mining Landscape: Bootleggers, Baptists, and the Promised Land 143 BY ROGER E. MEINERS AND ANDREW P. MORRISS 8. The Effects of Public Funding Systems on the Success of Private Conservation Through Land Trusts 167 BY DOMINIC P. PARKER PARTFOUR MEASURING THE WEALTH OF NATURE 9. The Wealth of Nature: Costs as Well as Benefits? 195 BY F. ANDREW HANSSEN IO. Counting the Wealth of Nature: An Overview of Ecosystem Valuation 211 BY TIMOTHY FITZGERALD AND A. MYRICK FREEMAN III n1. Do Resource States Do Worse? 235 BY RONALD N. JOHNSON 12. Why Individuals Provide Public Goods 261 BY DAVID D. HADDOCK Conclusion 289 Contributors 293

Are Involved Parents Providing Public Goods or Private Goods?

Parents who lobby their children's schools for better or increased educational resources may be providing a schoolwide public good. However, they may also be capturing a larger share of school resources, possibly leaving other families worse off. A regression of within-school variation in input quality on parent-initiated school contact identifies this ``private-good'' effect, using involvement in civic organizations to instrument for contact. A 10 percent increase in the probability of parental contact raises the probability of inclusion in a gifted program by 2 percent to 3 percent. At the average school, the highest ``non-gifted'' students significantly outscore the lowest ``gifted'' students, suggesting that this lobbying crowds out deserving students. Alongside these private-good effects, involved parents also provide public goods: again instrumenting with civic involvement, higher participation in a school's parent—teacher organization leads to a higher probability that principals frequently observe and evaluate all teachers at that school.

Providing Public Goods in the Absence of Strong Institutions

This paper proposes a simple two-stage mechanism to establish positive contributions to public goods in the absence of powerful institutions to provide the public good and to sanction free-riders. In this mechanism players commit to the public good by paying a deposit prior to the contribution stage. If there is universal commitment, deposits are immediately refunded whenever a player contributes her specified share to the public good. If there is no universal commitment, all deposits are refunded and the standard game is played. For suitable deposits, prior commitment and full ex post contributions are supported as a strict subgame perfect Nash equilibrium for the resulting game. As the mechanism obviates the need for any ex post prosecution of free-riders, it is particularly suited for situations where players do not submit to a common authority as in the case of international agreements.

Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain World

Defensive Internationalism: Providing Public Goods in an Uncertain World. By Davis B. Bobrow and Mark A. Boyer. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. 411p. 34.95 paper.Davis Bobrow and Mark Boyer address a topic of considerable current importance in both scholarly and policy circles—international cooperation, particularly among advanced industrial democracies—to produce what the authors call “progress,” that is, “improvements in actual and perceived conditions in fundamental terms—physical security, economic prosperity, ecological sustainability, and cultural continuity” (p. 6), and to avoid “regression,” defined as “worsening of those conditions in one or more of those respects” (p. 6). Their stated goal is to understand (in a clever reframing of the famous Harold Lasswell [1936] quote) “who gives, what, when, and how” (p. 1), since they believe that understanding this question is key to dealing successfully with a range of current global problems.

Experiments With the Pivot Process for Providing Public Goods

Interest in demand revealing mechanisms for providing public goods has both waned and then renewed over the past two decades. The possibility of using such mechanisms in different venues than originally anticipated sparked the research reported here. The specific motivation for this paper is to conduct a series of simple direct tests of one version of the class of mechanisms. Failure of demand revelation was much more expensive than we had expected, even when compared to previous research with related mechanisms. The reason for this remains an open question.

Public Goods in Theory and Practice Revisited

Previous article No AccessPublic Goods in Theory and Practice RevisitedJora R. MinasianJora R. Minasian Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Law and Economics Volume 10Oct., 1967 Sponsored by The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and The University of Chicago Law School Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/466639 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1967 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Lawrence H. White The Conflict Between Constitutionally Constraining the State and Empowering the State to Provide Public Goods, (Feb 2019): 133–146.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03080-3_7anna voloshinskaya, Vladimir Komarov (Modern Tools of Interaction between State and Society), SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2016).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2807909Milos N. Mladenovic, Montasir Abbas, Tristram McPherson Development of socially sustainable traffic-control principles for self-driving vehicles: The ethics of anthropocentric design, (May 2014): 1–8.https://doi.org/10.1109/ETHICS.2014.6893448