Public sector motivation and development failures

This paper provides a theoretical analysis of the relationship between public sector motivation and development. In the model the public sector produces a public good and workers are heterogeneous in terms of public sector motivation (PSM). Wages in the private sector increase with the quality of the public good. In this context, public sector wage premia (PSWP) have two opposite effects: low PSWP helps screen workers with PSM into the public sector, while high PSWP helps motivate workers to be honest. Raising PSWP may not improve the quality of governance and multiple equilibria might arise. The model highlights that the relative importance of workers selection and provision of ”on the job” incentives in the public sector varies in systematic ways with wages in the private sector. We provide anecdotal and original empirical evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions and discuss some policy implications for public sector reforms in developing countries.     

Existence of equilibrium and stratification in local and hierarchical Tiebout economies with property taxes and voting

Summary. This paper present the first fully closed general equilibrium model of hierarchical and local public goods economies with the following features: (i) multiple agent types who are endowed with both some amount of private good (income) and a house, who are mobile between houses and jurisdictions, and who vote in local and national elections; (ii) multiple communities that finance a local public good through property taxes which are set in accordance with absolute majority rule; and (iii) a national government that produces a national public good financed through an income tax whose level is determined through majority rule voting. In contrast to previous models, no overly restrictive assumptions on preferences and technologies are required to prove the existence of an equilibrium in the presence of property taxation and voting. Thus, the existence of an equilibrium is proved without any of the major restrictions used in the past, and sufficient conditons for stratification of agents into communities based on their public good preferences and their wealth levels are found. This model lays the groundwork for a positive applied analysis of local public finance and intergovernmental relations. It furthermore builds the foundation for the first parameterized computable general equilibrium model of local public goods and fiscal federalism. Received: February 1, 1996; revised version August 9, 1996     

Mixed oligopoly and spatial agglomeration: a comment

Abstract.  This paper extends Matsushima and Matsumura (2003) by incorporating a large production cost difference between public and private firms in a quantity setting spatial mixed oligopoly. The public and private firms first choose their locations in a linear market and then compete in quantities. It is shown that for a significant inefficiency of the public firm, all firms (including both public and private firms) agglomerate at the market centre.     

Optimal ownership of public goods reconsidered

Consider a non-governmental organization (NGO) that can invest in a public good. Should the government or the NGO own the public project? In an incomplete contracting framework with split-the-difference bargaining, Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party who values the public good most should be the owner. We demonstrate the robustness of their insight when the split-the-difference rule is replaced by the deal-me-out solution. Our finding is in contrast to the private good results of Chiu (1998) and De Meza and Lockwood (1998), who show that the optimal ownership structure crucially depends on whether the split-the-difference rule or the deal-me-out solution is used.     

The public and private provision of pure public goods and the distortionary effects of income taxation: a political economy approach

Abstract .  A pure public good is provided by the government and the voluntary contributions of two types of households. The government finances its contribution by means of income taxation. The latter has distortionary effects. A third type of household never makes contributions. We analyse the effects of changes in the income tax rate on (a) the provision of the public good, (b) the private contributions of the households, and (c) changes in the distribution of income and welfare between contributing and non-contributing households. We derive a simple and testable condition under which the lowering of the income tax entails a Pareto improvement.     

A form of government organization from the perspective of transaction cost economics

Taking the approach of the superfirm, we characterize government organization through six different features. First, citizens are viewed as sovereign owners of a superfirm; elected officials are employees of the sovereign citizens. Second, in analogy to the economic principle of the division of labor and specialization, a division of labor between five independent branches of government is advocated: the legislative, the budgetary, the executive, the law enforcement, and the judiciary branch. Third, we do not suggest a mechanism of checks and balances between government branches but deal with the threat of tyranny using the principle of separation of decision control and decision management developed by Eugene Fama and Michael Jensen. Fourth, with election as a decision control device, we demarcate the constituency of the budgetary branch by age groups to provide an explicit control mechanism for intertemporal and intergenerational trades. Fifth, to strengthen sovereign citizens' decision control, the powers to recall elected chief public servants, to declare emergency and war, to sign into international treaties, and to amend the constitution are vested with a national assembly. Sixth, there is no head of state.     

Restructuring hospital industry to control public health care expenditure: The role of input substitutability

In this paper we investigate the economic rationality of the bed downsizing process, characterising the hospital industry worldwide in the last decades, as a measure to control public health care expenditure. Considering a sample of Italian hospitals, we provide fresh evidence on the factor substitutability in the production of hospital services. Differently from other studies, based on North-American data and limited to pre-determined cost function models, we estimate a general specification (the Generalised Composite), and test it against traditional nested models (e.g. the Translog). For all the specifications we derive Allen, Morishima and Shadow elasticities of substitution between input pairs, obtaining a fairly consistent picture across all models and elasticity concepts. In particular, our results highlight a very limited degree of substitutability between factors in the production of hospital services, especially between beds and medical staff. These findings suggest that a restructuring policy of the hospital industry, which is confined to reducing the number of beds without involving workforce management, could not be a viable strategy for controlling public health care expenditure.     

FiMod — A DSGE model for fiscal policy simulations

This paper develops a medium-scale dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium (DSGE) model for fiscal policy simulations. Relative to existing models of this type, our model incorporates two important features. First, we consider a two-country monetary union structure, which makes it well suited to simulate fiscal measures by relatively large countries in a currency area. Second, we provide a notable degree of disaggregation on the government expenditures side, by explicitly distinguishing between (productivity-enhancing) public investment, public purchases and the public sector wage bill. In addition, we consider a labor market characterized by search and matching frictions, which allows to analyze the response of equilibrium unemployment to fiscal measures. In order to illustrate some of its applications, and motivated by recent policy debate in the Euro Area, we calibrate the model to Spain and the rest of the area and simulate a number of fiscal consolidation scenarios. We find that, in terms of output and employment losses, fiscal consolidation is the least damaging when achieved by reducing the public sector wage bill, whereas it is most damaging when carried out by cutting public investment.     

THE EFFECTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL FORM IN THE MIXED MARKET FOR FOSTER CARE

ABSTRACT ** : This paper uses proprietary quality of care data to examine the consequences of organizational form in privatized US foster care services. The contract failure hypothesis generically proposes that nonprofits should provide higher quality services, relative to for‐profits, when output is costly to observe. Advocates argue that the nonprofits offer important consumer protections when public services are contracted to private agencies. Contrary to expectations, we find that nonprofit firms do not offer higher quality services. We explore the possibility that monitoring efforts by state regulators or competition among foster care agencies effectively mitigate the influence of organizational form in this particular mixed market.     

Optimal privatization of vertical public utilities

Abstract We examine restructuring, divestiture, and deregulation of a vertically integrated public utility, (e.g., electricity), from a public finance perspective. How an optimal restructuring plan for the utility depends on the cost of public funds and on the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, how the optimal degree of competition in the upstream and downstream segments are connected, and implications of privatization for consumer prices are examined. The higher the cost of public funds, the more likely the post‐privatization price will exceed the regulated public utility price. The greater the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, the more likely the post‐privatization price will fall.     

UNPACKING THE INFLUENCE OF PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS ON DISASTER RESILIENCE: A COMPARISON OF EXPERT PERSPECTIVES

Public managers are under increasing pressure to develop and operate physical infrastructure systems that prove resilient in the face of natural disasters. At the same time, fiscal pressures and mounting infrastructure needs are drawing more and more attention to public–private partnerships (PPP) as a mechanism for delivering infrastructure. The research question guiding this study is how can the institutional designs of PPPs influence the potential for improving infrastructure resilience? We examined the perceived relationship between infrastructure resilience and PPPs by conducting and analyzing research interviews with twenty‐four senior infrastructure experts in Washington, DC. The results reflect findings of related privatization research, indicating that market‐based incentives can advance public values such as resilience, but the responsibility for ensuring they do so rests primarily with government. We note key differences in how the infrastructure investment experts and disaster resilience experts view issues in infrastructure management, and provide suggestions for improving public‐private collaboration to improve resilience.     

GOVERNMENT CONSUMPTION AND THE COMPOSITION OF PRIVATE EXPENDITURE: A CONDITIONAL ERROR CORRECTION MODEL

In this paper we provide empirical evidence of the relationship between government purchases and private expenditure by adopting a microeconomic approach. Using UK quarterly data, a long‐run demand system conditioned to the public sector is obtained by specifying a vector error correction model in which government consumption is assumed as an exogenous I(1) forcing variable. Our findings reject the hypothesis of separability of individual preferences between public and private expenditures, with simultaneous crowding‐out/in effects. Moreover, crowding‐out effects of government consumption on private spending are found to be larger for those goods and services that produce similar utility.     

A Theoretical Model of the Effects of Public Funding on Saving Decisions by Charitable Nonprofit Service Providers

Why do charitable nonprofit, service‐providing organizations save? What are the tradeoffs between using income to build up cash reserves and serving more clients? Saving may generate income, protect the organization against a drop in donations, and increase the organization's chances of survival. Saving, though, may affect the likelihood that nonprofits receive private and public funding. We model the relationship among private and public income, economic conditions, and nonprofit savings. We find that anticipation of government help during difficult times tends to reduce the amount of saving done by the nonprofit. This effect is strengthened if government officials view unspent donations as indicative of a lack of need. Both these effects provide a strong incentive for nonprofits to spend on current consumption rather than to save for the future, and thus to increase the burden on the public purse.     

Does endogenous formation of jurisdictions lead to wealth-stratification?

Conditions under which endogenous processes of jurisdiction formation entail wealth-stratification are examined in a model where unequally wealthy households with identical preferences form jurisdictions in order to produce a public good financed by proportional taxation. We define a stable jurisdiction structure to be a partition of the households into jurisdictions that is immune to individual deviations. We define a jurisdiction structure to be wealth-stratified when each jurisdiction is composed of households who form an interval with respect to the ordering of their wealth. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the stratification of any stable jurisdiction structure is for the individual preferences for the public and the private good to exhibit a relation of gross substitutability/complementarity between the public good and the private good that is independent from prices and wealth.     

Foreign aid preferences and perceptions in donor countries

We present original survey data on preferences for foreign aid in 24 donor countries from 2005 to 2008. On publicly-funded foreign aid (Official Development Assistance, or ODA), we find patterns that are consistent with a standard model of democratic policy formation, in which donations are treated as a pure public good. Controlling for perceptions of current ODA, we show that individual preferences for ODA are (i) negatively correlated with relative income within a country-year; and (ii) positively correlated with inequality at the country level. We extend the analysis to explain variation in the gap between desired aid and actual ODA, arguing that lobbying by high-income special interest groups can divert resources away from the median voter’s preferred level of aid. Consistent with this, we observe that ODA is significantly lower where policymakers are more susceptible to lobbying. Finally, we present a novel test of competing “crowding out” hypotheses. Self-reported private aid donations are negatively correlated with actual ODA, and positively correlated with perceived ODA. This finding is consistent with an emerging argument in the literature, whereby ODA crowds out private aid by enabling charities to forego fundraising activities and crowds in private aid through a signaling channel.     

Understanding nonprofit social enterprises: Lessons from Austrian economics

There is a large literature on the role of nonprofit enterprises within society. This literature typically views nonprofits as either substitutes for government enterprises or complements to, and even necessary extensions of, these government efforts. While this literature has improved our understanding of the role and importance of nonprofit social enterprises, how social entrepreneurs identify opportunities, allocate resources, and adapt to changing circumstances has been relatively underexplored. Efforts to fill this gap within Austrian economics have categorized nonprofits and identified the limitations of calculation and coordination in the nonprofit sector and the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful nonprofit enterprises. This strand of literature focuses on the differences between economic calculation in for-profit enterprises and decision making in nonprofit enterprises. We argue that another meaningful aspect to determining the ability of nonprofit enterprises to coordinate plans is whether they are structured more like private enterprises and public enterprises. These insights from Austrian economics shed light on why some nonprofits are more effective than others at achieving social goals.

     

Public goods with congestion

I consider the problem of the efficient provision of a congested (limited capacity) public good in a setting with asymmetric information. I show, in particular, that when the capacity of the good is limited, in a wide class of economies it is possible to construct an incentive compatible mechanism that always produces the good at the efficient level, balances the budget and satisfies voluntary participation constraints. This result is in contrast with the corresponding impossibility result for pure public goods due to Mailath and Postlewaite (Rev. Econ. Stud. 57 (1990) 351-359) and Rob (J. Econ. Theory 47 (1989) 307-333).     

QUALITY AND WELFARE IN MIXED DUOPOLY: EFFECTS OF CAPACITY REDUCTION*

Under rationing of a public service due to its lower price and higher quality, the “privatization” could be regarded as a reduction in the capacity of the public service. We develop a model of mixed duopoly in which the service is vertically differentiated, a public firm is in a Stackelberg leader position, rationing happens, and the market is not covered. In one of two possible cases, it is shown that any reduction in the capacity of a public service will lower total surplus unless the price of the public service is too low and its quality is too high.