The Italian approach to the theory of public goods *

Abstract

The subject of needs is the centre of attention of Italian public finance scholars. The financial activity of the State is justified by the existence of collective or public needs to whose satisfaction collective or public goods and services are linked. Italian economists have studied the problems of public goods in a general context, taking into consideration concurrently both taxes and public expenditure and giving prominence to positive analysis. Italian theorists have always been far removed from the classical approach, which denies the productivity of public services, and have deemed it necessary to take into account the political context in which fiscal structures operate. Their models include the State as a major factor. Herein lies the main value of the Italian tradition in public finance, which puts in coercion into the market mechanism via State intervention.     

Public goods,voting, and growth

We study a parametric politico‐economic model of economic growth with productive public goods and public consumption goods. The provision of public goods is funded by a proportional tax. Agents are heterogeneous in their initial capital endowments, discount factors, and the relative weights of public consumption in overall private utility. They vote on the shares of public goods in gross domestic products (GDP). We propose a definition of voting equilibrium, prove the existence and provide a characterization of voting equilibria, and obtain a closed‐form solution for the voting outcomes. Also we introduce a “fictitious” representative agent and interpret the outcome of voting as a choice made by a central planner for his benefit. Finally, we undertake comparative static analysis of the shares of public goods in GDP and of the rate of balanced growth with respect to the discount factors and the preferences for public consumption. The results of this analysis suggest that the representative‐agent version of our model is capable of capturing the interaction between many voting heterogeneous agents only if the heterogeneity is one‐dimensional.     

Public consumer goods, output-generated variable returns, and labor supply

This paper develops a simple general-equilibrium model of a closed economy. The economy under consideration produces two final goods, one private and one public, which are both produced with labor and an intermediate good under constant returns to scale. The intermediate good is produced by labor alone, and its production is subject to output-generated variable returns to scale. The public good can be interpreted as government spending on environmental quality, police protection, cultural activities, and publicly funded health care. The model is used to examine the impact of an exogenous change in labor supply on the size of the government, relative prices, and welfare. Within the context of the present study, an increase in labor supply can be attributed to either exogenous immigration or population growth. The model is also used to examine the relationship between the size of the country and the pattern of trade.     

绿色信贷导向的管理学解释——基于新公共服务理论视角

政府绿色信贷导向的产生,有其一定的管理学背景,即新公共服务理论。新公共服务理论要求公共组织以人为本,追求社会公共利益最大化。按照这一思路,在环境保护融资路径方面,就应建立政府支持与市场供给相结合的环境保护融资体制。近年来,政府对传统的环境污染治理体制进行了一系列变革,为银行参与环境污染治理创造了基本的条件,也为推行绿色信贷提供了必要的基础。     

Giffen goods and market making

Summary. This paper shows that information effects per se are not responsible for the Giffen goods anomaly affecting traders demands in multi asset noisy, rational expectations equilibrium markets. The role that information plays in traders strategies also matters. In a market with risk averse, uninformed traders, informed agents have a dual trading motive: speculation and market making. The former entails using prices to assess the effect of error terms; the latter requires employing them to disentangle noise traders demands within aggregate orders. In a correlated environment this complicates the signal extraction problem and may generate upward sloping demand curves. Assuming (i) that competitive, risk neutral market makers price the assets or that (ii) uninformed traders risk tolerance coefficient grows unboundedly, removes the market making component from informed traders demands rendering them well behaved in prices.Received: 30 April 2002, Revised: 3 December 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: G100, G120, G140.Support from the Barcelona Economics Program of CREA and the Ente per gli Studi Monetari e Finanziari Luigi Einaudi, are gratefully acknowledged. I thank Anat Admati, Jordi Caballé, Giacinta Cestone, and Xavier Vives for useful suggestions. The comments provided by the Associate Editor and an anonymous referee greatly improved the papers exposition.     

实验经济学的兴起与公共产品理论的发展

实验经济学是经济学的一个新的分支,其研究内容主要包括个人决策、市场交易、博弈论、学习理论和方法论。它的兴起对公共财政论的核心理论——公共产品理论产生了影响,加深了搭便车问题的研究,对如何有效提供公共产品从实验角度给出了有益的启示,推动了公共产品理论的研究。     

Conditional Cooperation and Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods

We compare a partners condition , where the same small group of subjects plays a repeated public good game, to a strangers condition , where subjects play this game in changing group formations. From the first period onward, subjects in the partners condition contribute significantly more to the public good than subjects in the strangers condition. Strangers' contributions show continual decay, while partners' contributions fluctuate on a high level prior to decreasing in the final periods. We interpret subjects' behaviour in terms of conditional cooperation which is characterized by both future-oriented and reactive behaviour.
JEL classifications: C 91; C 92; H 41     

公共产品供给中的“政府失灵”现象分析

公共产品是指消费过程中具有非排他性和非竞争性的产品。从本质上讲,生产公共产品与市场机制的作用是矛盾的,生产者是不会主动生产公共产品的。而公共产品是全社会成员所必须消费的产品,它的满足状况也反映了一个国家的福利水平。这就需要由政府来承担提供公共产品的责任。但是,政府部门在提供公共物品时趋向于浪费和滥用资源,致使公共支出规模过大或者效率降低,政府的活动并不总像应该的那样或像理论所说的那样“有效”。克服这种现象,有三种政策选择：（1）市场化改革;（2）宪法改革;（3）政府机构改革。     

Public goods, merit goods, and the relation between private and government consumption

In this paper, we investigate the relation between public and private consumption, by constructing a general government spending data set, by function, for 12 European countries. In particular, we split government consumption into two categories. The first category—“public goods”—includes defence, public order, and justice. The second category—“merit goods”—includes health, education, and other services that could have been provided privately. Equations from a relatively general permanent income model are estimated by GMM. The estimates are fairly robust in showing that public goods substitute while merit goods complement private consumption. However, the relation between merit goods and private goods turns out to be stronger than that between public goods and private goods. Thus, in the aggregate government and private consumption are complements.     

Ethnic diversity, tax limitations and public goods

One strand of research in public economics has found that increasing ethnic diversity leads to reductions in provision of productive public goods. Another strand of research has emphasized the key role that tax and expenditure limitations play in the provision of public services. This paper explores the interaction between these two effects. The regression results suggest that the prior results on ethnic diversity are robust when TELs are taken into consideration. In addition, the imposition of TELs mitigates the negative effect of ethnic fragmentation on the share of local spending on education and roads. It also mitigates the positive correlation between ethnic diversity and total local government revenue and expenditure per capita.     

公共品供给的政府效率解及其条件分析

传统经济理论认为,在任何一个集体中,因任何一种公共品的成本分摊与收益分享,都普遍存在着"搭便车"者的个人理性行为以及由此导致的集体非理性的结局———人人都无"车"可搭的"公共"悲剧,断言公共品供给是市场失败的领域,必须由政府替代。用斯密的市场秩序概念来处理所有的私人品,用霍布斯的主权国家概念来处理所有的公共品,也是市场经济国家资源配置制度安排的普遍选择。我认为,"搭便车"或经济人理性行为是合乎公理的经济学假设,但"搭便车"问题并不一定非由政府强制来解决不可。从理论上说,公共品的供给存在政府效率解,但政府效率解有严格的约束条件,公共品供给中的政府职能与政府失灵也都是相对于其效率条件以及满足这些条件的程度而言的。     

Country size and the voluntary provision of international public goods

Standard studies on voluntary contributions to an international public good treat national economies as if they were single agents. This masks the fact that nations are comprised of populations of citizens, whose collective benefits a national government takes account of when deciding on the amount of the contributions. This paper constructs a model which explicitly allows for the effect of population differences and explores their consequences. We can then present the so-called exploitation of the great by the small by Olson and Zeckhauser [Olson, M., Zeckhauser, R., 1966. An economic theory of alliances. Review of Economics and Statistics 48 (1966) 266–279] and explore how residents of larger countries fare relative to those in smaller countries. We also elaborate on the effects of changing populations and show that growing into a large country is not necessarily beneficial for the country's residents.     

Institutions, motivations and public goods: An experimental test of motivational crowding

Contributions to public goods can be motivated by intrinsic factors such as warm glow altruism and fairness, as well as extrinsic incentives such as sanctions and payments. However, psychological studies suggest that formal extrinsic incentives may crowd out intrinsic motivations. In an experimental study of individual contributions to a public good we find that suasion crowded in voluntary contributions, while an extrinsic incentive in the form of a regulation led to crowding out. This has implications for the design of public policy where ranges of motivations are present.     

公共池塘资源自主治理理论与我国农村社区公共产品治理的研究

埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆的公共池塘资源自主治理理论完善了准公共产品理论,结合社会资本因素的集体行动及制度供给理论给我们提供了研究农村社区公共产品供给及治理新的视角。基于此,在简要回顾目前国内农村社区公共产品治理研究及其不足之处的基础上,借鉴公共池塘资源自主治理理论,提出今后我国农村社区公共产品治理研究中需要进一步加强研究的内容及方向,以促进农村公共事业的可持续发展。     

中国农村公共品供给与农村财政制度创新

近年来我国以农业发展缓慢、农民负担沉重、农村社会问题突出为主要表象的“三农”问题,虽然原因是多方面的,但是农村公共品供给不力是其中最重要的方面。这就要求我们从公共财政学的角度科学地安排农村公共品的供给,进行农村财政制度创新。     

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Note on Public Goods,Information Technology,and Productivity

This research note advances a conjecture that may help to explain the “paradox” of productivity and information technology (IT). Conventional measures of the economic output of the IT sector may substantially understate the actual value of IT because software is a public good, which is largely unpriced. I provide a simple exploratory calculation that lends plausibility to this explanation. I hope that this conjecture may inspire research by those with greater expertise in the evolution of software.     

Strength of the Social Dilemma in a Public Goods Experiment: An Exploration of the Error Hypothesis

We present the results of an experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good with a unique dominant strategy equilibrium in the interior of the strategy space. The treatment variable is the equilibrium contribution level. By increasing the equilibrium contribution level, we reduce the strength of the social dilemma. Though we observe that the average level of contribution rises with the equilibrium contribution level, the average rate of over-contribution is not affected in a systematic way. Over-contribution is statistically significant only at the lower level of equilibrium contribution but not at the higher levels. We show that the Anderson et al. (1998, Journal of Public Economics. 70, 297–323) logit equilibrium model which combines altruism and decision errors fits quite well our laboratory data.     

公共物品、分工演进与经济增长

在新兴古典经济学框架内,公共物品既能通过提高交易效率来促进分工演进并最终带来经济增长,也可通过改善劳动效率直接促进产出的增加,经济增长中的两难冲突发生于专业化经济和公共物品对劳动时间这一资源的争夺,资源的最终分配取决于三个重要的经济参数即专业化经济系数、公共物品的交易效率系数和劳动效率系数的大小和变化情况。文章最后从历史经验的角度来论证主要结论的正确性。     

专用性公共品与企业性质:一种新观点

文章提出了一种新的企业观,即企业是为获取专用性公共品帕累托最优解的经济组织.任何生产活动都离不开公共品和私人物品.受成本约束,政府通常只会提供通用性公共品,专用于企业的公共品通常只能由企业自身来提供.但是当收益不能在各合约当事人之间作线性分配时,由各合约当事人自主提供公共品会严格劣于帕累托最优量.政府提供的公共品与企业自身提供的专用性公共品具有一定程度的替代性.模型证明,随着政府提供的公共品增加,当合作收益较大时,会导致企业规模趋于扩大;当合作收益较小时,企业规模趋于缩小,市场分工趋于发达.文章还对企业专用性公共品的内容进行了详细分析.     

Rotating group representatives and group members’ requests in repeated public goods game

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the effect of group representatives on contribution behaviour in response to group members’ requests in repeated public goods games. Data came from 135 students in 15 groups enrolled in the experiment, grouped in the following treatments: no group representatives (NR, NRG) and group representatives (R1, R2). We also tested initial requests wherein the group members’ initial requests (i.e. NRG, R2) mediated the positive relationship between individual-level contribution preferences and group contributions. We used a fixed-effects GLS regression and IV regression to analyse the effect of group representatives and group members’ requests. The results indicated the following: (a) rotating group representative/group members’ requests was related to group contributions at the session (within-members) and group (between-group) levels; (b) the reactions to members’ requests positively predicted group contributions; (c) subjects in the no group representatives treatment formed their requests by relying more on previous group contributions than subjects in the group representatives treatment, who relied more on the previous group members’ requests; and (d) the initial requests explained long-term contribution levels, which resulted in variations in group contributions observed between the NRG and R2 treatments. Our findings highlight the role of rotating group representatives in stimulating cooperation among members, while group members’ requests impel individuals to make contribution decisions at the group level.