Theory Of Public Goods Research Articles

James Madison: the theory and practice of republican government

Contributors vii 1. Introduction 1 samuel kernell 2. Before and after Publius: Sources and Influence of Madison's Political Thought 14 iain mclean 3. Madison's Theory of Public Goods 41 keith l. dougherty 4. Personal Motives, Constitutional Forms, and the Public Good: Madison on Political Leadership 63 randall strahan 5. The True Principles of tRepublican Government: Reassessing James Madison's Political Science 92 samuel kernell 6. Madisonian Separation of Powers 126 john ferejohn 7. Madison's Dilemma: Revisiting the Relationship between the Senate and the Great at the Constitutional Convention 156 daniel widaniel wirls 8. Constituting a National Interest: Madison against the States' Autonomy 184 david brian robertson 9. Madisonian Scheme to Control the National Government 217 jenna bednar 10. Madison at the First Congress: Institutional Design and Lessons from the Continental Congress, 1780-1783 243 rick k. wilson 11. Vote Trading in the First Federal Congress? James Madison and the Compromise of 1790 264 d. roderick kiewiet 12. Madison and the Founding of the Two-Party System 302 norman schofield appendix James Madison, Vices of the Political System of the United 329 James Madison, Federalist 10, 56-65 334 James Madison, Federalist 51, 347-53 340 James Madison to Thomas Jefferson 343 Works Cited 351 Index 369 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Madison, James, 1751-1836 Political and social views, United States Politics and government 1783-1809, United States Politics and government Philosophy, Republicanism United States History 18th century, Federal government United States History 18th century, Political leadership United States History 18th century, Political science United States History 18th century

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND INTER‐JURISDICTIONAL COMPETITION

The European Union does not set its regulatory principles in line with those that the theory of public goods suggests. The Union does not have full competence in areas such as defence that might involve public goods over a Europe‐wide area. Yet it does have competence over many areas that should be left to member states or local government. However, if competition between jurisdictions is prevented, there will be a drift towards centralisation of economic decision‐making. This paper analyses this trend from the point of view of the theory of clubs and theories of market failure.

Globalisation and National Incentives for Protecting Environmental Goods: Types of Goods, Trade Effects, and International Collective Action Problems

This article tries to explain national incentives for protecting environmental goods either autonomously or collectively; it explores how globalisation has affected those incentives; and it suggests how national environmental policy might respond so as to ensure its effectiveness. The central argument is that national incentives for environmental protection may to a considerable extent be explained by a combination of the type of environmental good to be protected (in terms of public goods theory) and the effects of environmental protection measures on international competitiveness. Arrangements for protecting environmental goods can be ranked according to their centripetal effects on non-participating countries. Centripetal effects are strongest in the case of club goods (1), followed by private goods (2), public goods (3), and common pool resources (4). The centripetal effects resulting from the type of environmental good can be further reinforced by competitive advantages resulting from environmental protection measures; they can be weakened by competitive disadvantages; or they can remain unchanged due to competitive neutrality. The combination of four types of environmental goods and three types of competitive effects (positive, negative, neutral) results in twelve possible cases, with differing national incentives for autonomous and collective environmental protection. Given specific assumptions, these twelve cases can be ranked with regard to the severity of collective action problems they involve. The article includes a short empirical illustration for each case. It also analyses how globalisation (in the form of increasing trade) and some of its driving forces (in the form of free trade agreements) influence national incentives and legal possibilities for environmental protection. This article concludes with a brief discussion of four options for (re-)expanding the action space for national environmental policies under the condition of economic globalisation.

The pure theory of public goods: the case of many commodities

The validity of the two welfare theorems is established in the context of production economies with an abstract set of public projects and an infinite-dimensional commodity space.

The City Park as a Public Good Reference for Internet Policy Making

Extensive literature has provided evidence of the organic nature of the Internet as adomain for different sorts of activities. Most policy making regarding the Internet,however, has focused on its economic dimensions (e.g. e-commerce, copyrights,privacy) while taking timid steps when it comes to its cultural and social dimensions.We propose a more comprehensive approach for global policy making on the Internetby looking retrospectively at processes that led to the creation of urban parks, andexamining those processes in light of public goods theory. We conducted historicaland theoretical analyses to show that, in the same way urban parks define spacesthat mediate between different functions of the city, it is possible to define bufferspaces within the Internet that mediate between competing spheres of activity. As acomplex phenomenon involving infrastructure, applications, and content, the Internetpossesses features that can be located at different points between purely private andpurely public goods. This fact parallels the growing attention that public goodstheorists are paying to non-economic factors to explain the provisions of goodsunder circumstances that do not easily fit supply/demand laws. We argue that urbanparks, as hybrid public goods, offer a reference for the design of policies thatharmonize competing interests because they are spaces justified by manifold rationales(economic, political, social and cultural). As parks offer possibilities for spontaneousre-appropriations of the city as a cohesive entity (i.e. something beyond adisconnected collection of populations), defining similar multi-purpose spaces on theInternet would facilitate coexistence of competing and complementary behavioursby allowing users to re-appropriate this technology as a comprehensive entity beyonda mere aggregation of transactions and interests.

Wicksell, Lindahl and the Theory of Public Goods

AbstractWicksell's and Lindahl's ideas on public goods and decisions are reviewed in light of later developments in the theoretical economics literature. I begin by discussing their normative ideals, in particular the notion of justness, and the sources of the difficulties in reaching them. Wicksell's and Lindahl's ideal states, as well as the obstacles that they perceive, are compared to more recent views on free riding and on the behavior of elected representatives. Their views on political bargaining are then related to later concepts, in particular to the core of the economy.

Peer-to-peer file sharing communities

Peer-to-peer file sharing communities present a paradox for standard public goods theory, which predicts that free-riding should preclude the success of the community. We present a model in which users choose their level of sharing, downloading, and listening in the presence of sharing costs and endogenous downloading costs. In our model, sharing emerges endogenously, largely as a byproduct of users' attempts to reduce own-costs.

Public Goods Theory and the Provision of Refugee Protection: The Role of the Joint-Product Model in Burden-Sharing Theory

Much of the existing forced migration literature on burden‐sharing implicitly or explicitly assumes humanitarian provision to refugees, whether in the form of asylum or contributions to international refugee agencies, to be an international public good. This assumption has profound implications because it is interpreted to imply that refugee provision is inevitably characterized by collective action failure in the absence of a highly integrated formal regime structure. However, the existing debate has yet to identify explicitly what those public benefits are or to distinguish between the range of benefits and their varying degrees of excludability between states. This paper attempts to address these shortcomings by introducing the notion of ‘joint‐products’ to the burden‐sharing debate, arguing that there are multiple benefits, varying in their degree of excludability, that accrue to the providing states. The policy implications for regime structure and the incentives required to induce provision are explored.

The Public Goods Rationale for Government and the Circularity Problem

It has been suggested that the production of public goods through a government involves a circularity problem. Since government itself is a public good, how can we use government to produce other public goods? Several solutions to this supposed circularity are offered. Government is a unique kind of public good with some potentially self-generating and self-supporting features. The public goods theory of government remains intact, and this enterprise helps shed some light on the special features of government.

The superiority of "chemical thinking" for understanding free human society according to Hegel.

This paper examines the claim of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) that "chemical thinking"-the method of thinking employed in chemistry-marks a significant advance upon (and hence is superior to) "mechanistic thinking"-the method of thinking characteristic of physics. This is done in the context of Mancur Olson's theory of collective action and public goods. The analogy between the efficiency of a catalyst in bringing about chemical transformation and the function of leaders in free human society in developing latent groups to provide public goods is explored.

Teach a Man to Fish and You Can Sell Him Bait for a Lifetime

The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid. By Bertin Martens, Uwe Mummert, Peter Murrell, Paul Seabright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 212 pp., $60.00 (ISBN: 0-5218-0818-9). With The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid , Bertin Martens and his colleagues—economists with a mixture of experience in academia and foreign aid agencies—have made a wonderful contribution to the literature on foreign aid. In particular, they tackle the question of why foreign aid programs, despite their substantial magnitude, have met with so little success in helping recipient nations develop economically. The book nicely complements other work in this area (Cassen 1994; Hook 1995; Tarp 2000). The approach Martens and his colleagues take is largely theoretical, but they use their own experiences and the experiences of other practitioners in aid bureaucracies to provide empirical content for their arguments. Drawing heavily from public goods theory and the literature on principal–agent problems, they present a series of models that explain how the institutional structures of donor governments, recipient governments, and aid agencies combine with information asymmetries to affect the behavior of the individuals charged with administering and evaluating foreign aid programs. They demonstrate that these institutional structures can lead to aid programs that serve the interests of neither donor nor recipient, even when all involved are well intentioned. The crux of the argument in The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid rests on the notion that foreign aid programs are, politically, exceedingly complex endeavors. Multiple layers of principal–agent relationships exist, each characterized by information asymmetries. These asymmetries create a fractured feedback loop through which each principal must evaluate the …

Les écarts de connaissances scientifiques et techniques Nord/Sud au regard de la théorie des biens publics mondiaux

Philippe HUGON — Margins of scientific and technical knowledge between the North and the South, in regard to the theory of Global Public Goods. The dilemma between private production and collective use of knowledge - a Global Public Good - underscores the renewal of the problematic concerning constructed, transferred and shared knowledge, and concerning the universalism and particularity of knowledge. Other than the postulate and theory of Public and Collective Goods, the analysis has to be posited in terms of conflicts and tensions between local and global knowledge, between intellectual property rights and rights to use, or the rights of « people », and in terms of the limits of merchandising. This article first presents the debate, and then its implications in developing economies.

Bringing together or driving apart the union? Towards a theory of differentiated integration

This contribution develops a theory of the impact of differentiation on integration and unity among EU member states and discusses empirical evidence from four policy areas. According to the theory, the centripetal effects of closer co‐operation among willing EU members on initially unwilling non‐participants are strongly influenced by the character of the respective policy area in terms of public goods theory. The eventual participation of initially reluctant member states, which leads to the re‐establishment of long‐run unity despite short run differentiation, is most likely in policy areas involving excludable network effects, and most unlikely in areas dealing with common pool resource problems (the four remaining types of goods ranking in between these two extremes). The theoretical conclusions are supported by empirical evidence from four EU‐related policies: the successful three show strong characteristics of excludable network goods (EMU, Schengen and the Dublin Convention), while the one which has proved extraordinarily difficult so far involves a common pool resource problem (tax harmonisation).

Bringing Together or Driving Apart the Union? Towards a Theory of Differentiated Integration

This contribution develops a theory on the impact of differentiation on integration and unity among EU member states and discusses empirical evidence from four policy areas. According to the theory, the centripetal effects of closer cooperation among willing EU members on initially unwilling non-participants are strongly influenced by the character of the respective policy area in terms of public goods theory. The eventual participation of initially reluctant member states, which leads to the re-establisment of long run unity despite short run differentiation, is most likely in policy areas involving excludable network effects, and most unlikely in areas dealing with common pool resource problems (the four remaining types of goods ranking in between these two extremes). The theoretical conclusions are supported by empirical evidence from four EU-related policies, the three successful of which show strong characteristics of excludable network goods (EMU, Schengen and the Dublin Convention), while the one which has proved extraordinarily difficult so far involves a common pool resource problem (tax harmonisation).

Do Children Create an Externality in the Provision of Public Education?

In 1972, Oakland presented a formal theory of congestible public goods. One implication of the Oakland model is that the marginal benefit of consuming a congestible public good, like public education, depends on both the level of congestion and the capacity of provision. This study uses a county-level panel data set (1967-1987), in the context of the Oakland model, to examine the effect of a “children externality” on the consumption of public education, a congestible public good. Viewed as a congestion cost, one would expect the number of school children in a community (i.e., the children externality) to contribute negatively to the service provision of public education, all else equal. Because this children externality, or consumption sharing of the public good, can be mitigated or eliminated by expanding the capacity, tax limits imposed on a local community’s ability to expand this capacity will further add to an already congested facility. Anticipating the results, the authors demonstrate that both the children externality and limits to expanding capacity lead to significantly lower per pupil expenditures on local public education.

A classroom game course for teaching public goods theory

A classroom game course for teaching public goods theory

The theory of regulation: A review article

This paper examines the various theoretical issues in regulation with a view to enhancing understanding of the regulation arena. Special emphasis has been placed on the banking industry. The paper shows how regulation serves different purposes for different interest groups on different occasions. It further argues that because of the ever shifting concept of ‘public good’, shifting individual and group interest and, perhaps the entwinement of individual and public good, neither the capture theory or the public good theory has yet fully explained the rationale for regulation. A clear understanding of the theoretical issues involved in regulation is therefore important if the forces that drive regulation are to be appreciated fully.

Property rights and sustainable nature tourism: adaptation and mal-adaptation in Dalarna (Sweden) and Maine (USA)

Tourism is viewed in many industrial nations as an environmentally friendly way to revitalize distressed rural economies and communities. In the forest regions of Dalarna and interior Maine, hopes are pinned on nature-based tourism, with the presumption that natural capital is underutilized. This paper explores the potential and pitfalls of nature tourism as a basis for sustainable rural development in regions where most land is held privately but quasi-open access for recreation has been either a right (Dalarna) or a customary entitlement (Maine). The paper applies theories of common pool resources and impure public goods to show that both property regimes are mal-adapted for sustainable nature tourism. Limited exclusion combined with rivalness in land uses mis-aligns incentives facing landowners, tourists, and recreation businesses. Short-term effects include congestion, reduced economic opportunity, and depressed production of non-recreational goods. Longer-term effects include environmental degradation and weak incentives for value-added investment. Tourism development is further impeded by a scale mis-match between small ownerships and large efficient recreation management units. The analysis suggests that sustainable nature tourism faces four land use challenges.

Refounding the African state and local self-governance: the neglected foundation

The political revolution of contemporary Africa has so far largely been limited to the centre and to re-establishing the same institutional forms and processes which failed Africa in the 1960s. These regimes are already showing signs of erosion. This problem can be understood through the theory of public goods. Key collective or ‘public’ goods problems impede the collective action necessary for institutional development. Top-down strategies cannot surmount these problems because they cannot integrate and unify the population or structure consensual and sustained collective action.As currently constituted, national levels of government in Africa will be poor partners with local communities in development, be it of democracy or of the economy. In many cases, national regimes only exist at all because minimal contributing sets or political monopolists controlled, were given, or mobilised the resources to establish constituting rule systems which they used to sustain their existing relative advantages during the break-up of imperial systems. As this advantage is usually at the expense of the majority which lives outside the capitals, resources and policies to improve these areas are slow in coming. The slow, bottom-up process by which a true public constitution is built, one which reflects and elaborates generally held values, is built on existing political relationships, and protects social diversity, has never been allowed to develop.Refounding the African state must resolve these problems if it is to succeed. Ethnically and religiously diverse peoples will rule themselves better under federal and consociational systems which give local leaders space to lead local institutional development, authority to play a role in national governance, a process to develop consensus on central policy and to check the centre when there is no consensus. This requires a foundation of viable, real, developed structures of local governance if it is to succeed.

Modeling charitable contributions of time and money

Public goods theory predicts that government spending on charity can perfectly crowd-out charitable contributions. Empirical research has found little support for the perfect crowd-out hypothesis. However, the empirical work only measures part of a contributor's total contribution: gifts of money. Contributors also volunteer labor. This article extends the public goods model to the case in which individuals contribute both time and money to a charity that in turn produces a public good. The model suggests that charitable contributions of time and money are perfectly substitutable in equilibrium. This result offers new interpretations for existing empirical observations, and suggests a new test of the crowd-out hypothesis. The implications of the model are empirically tested using a national survey of charitable activity.