Higher education in the United States faces a loss of trust. Much of the response to the public's decreasing confidence has been through the accountability movement's focus on individual, private benefits. Public trust, however, will require proactive societal engagement that provides a compelling case for the contributions that higher education makes to the public good. While these challenges are discussed from a US perspective, there are global implications.
Borders are not definite, they can change over time. Recent examples are the disintegration of the Soviet Union and of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. Within countries, borders between municipalities can change as well. Border changes can be relatively peaceful, like it was the case in Czechoslovakia, but they can also go together with violence, like it was the case with Eastern Timor. This book contains a study of the incentives individuals have to form jurisdictions, using throughout a microeconomic approach. Consecutively, the roles of public good provision, of intergovernmental transfers and of violence are discussed. The analysis argues that individuals have incentives to form jurisdictions that are smaller than optimal from a social welfare point of view, but that intergovernmental transfers can alleviate this. The discussion on violence sheds some light on the incentives for the use of violence and how this affects political outcomes.
Metadata only record ; NGO's are linked to environmental objectives for good reason: non-profit NGO's provide a flexible, private-sector answer to the provision of international environmental public goods. The non-profit sector can link for profit, non-profit, and public-sector objectives in complex contracts. This article examines how, for the case of the National Biodiversity Institute (INBio) in Costa Rica, such complex contracts with both domestic and international parties provide partial solutions to public goods problems in the absence of private property rights over genetic resources. INBio's 'monopoly' position, legitimized by the local government, brings in rents from genetic resources which are reinvested in the production of public goods.
We set out and solve a static neoclassical model with a labor/leisure choice for agents and a government sector producing a Samuelsonian public good. Numerical solutions vary considerably with the elasticity of substitution for commodities in an agent's utility function. We focus on solutions with an income tax rate set by the government (second best solutions). Government revenue varies with the rate of income tax (expressed in a Laffer Curve) and we observe that such curves generally peak "internally" only for case of "high" elasticity values in the utility function of a representative agent. Inelastic substitution possibilities involve the peaking of the Laffer Curve at a corner with the rate of income tax tending to unity. We report on welfare analysis for small changes in the rate of income tax and on first best outcomes (agents charged Samuelson "prices" for the public good).
This volume brings together 8 previously unpublished papers dealing with various modes of allocating jointly consumable goods (i.e. public goods). The issues covered range from voluntary contributions and price exclusion (market allocation) to positive and normative analyses of different political allocation procedures for public goods. Given this wide spectrum of allocative schemes for public goods there does not seem to be an easy and clear-cut message from modern public-goods theory to public allocation policy.
As Americans, we expect and take for granted an ever increasing supply and choices of quality, affordable food while also generating a positive balance in international trade. We also expect that this can be achieved with decreasing use of pesticides, all the while accepting the transfer of agricultural land to roads, housing and recreation as well as the transfer of some of it back to nature. To meet these expectations, agriculture must convert from a resource-based to a knowledge-based enterprise. The new tools of biotechnology offer the latest means to this increase this knowledge base while meeting the many expectations of agriculture.
We experimentally investigate a legislative bargaining model with both public and particularistic goods. Consistent with the qualitative implications of the model: There is near exclusive public good provision in the pure public good region, in the pure private good region minimum winning coalitions sharing private goods predominate, and in the 'mixed' region proposers generally take some particularistic goods for themselves, allocating the remainder to public goods. As in past experiments, proposer ower is not nearly as strong as predicted, resulting in public good provision decreasing in the mixed region as its relative value increases, which is inconsistent with the theory.
This note reports a modification of one use of the translog production function reported by Binswanger (1973, 1978). The method employed in this study recognizes that changes in factor shares over time are affected by a variety of decision variables including research and extension. In addition, some of the changes attributed to technical change may in fact be due to a change in the resource environment the individual decision maker faces, including the stock of public goods infrastructure. The study also investigates shifts in technological change which may be attributed to changes in the political climate." -- Author's Abstract ; ISI; IFPRI3 ; PR
We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and the village. When districts unite, underprovision persists in the village (and may even become more severe), whereas overprovision of public goods arises in the city as urbanites use their political power to exploit the villagers. From a social welfare point of view, inhabitants of the village have insufficient incentives to vote for unification. We examine how national transfers to local governments can resolve these problems.
I investigate if, how, and why the effect of a contribution rule in a public goods game depends on how it is implemented: endogenously chosen or externally imposed. The rule prescribes full contributions to the public good backed by a nondeterrent sanction for those who do not comply. My experimental design allows me to disentangle to what extent the effect of the contribution rule under democracy is driven by self-selection of treatments, information transmitted via the outcome of the referendum, and democracy per se. In case treatments are endogenously chosen via a democratic decision-making process, the contribution rule significantly increases contributions to the public good. However, democratic participation does not affect participants' contribution behavior directly, after controlling for self-selection of treatments and the information transmitted by voting.
I investigate if, how, and why the effect of a contribution rule in a public goods game depends on how it is implemented: endogenously chosen or externally imposed. The rule prescribes full contributions to the public good backed by a nondeterrent sanction for those who do not comply. My experimental design allows me to disentangle to what extent the effect of the contribution rule under democracy is driven by self-selection of treatments, information transmitted via the outcome of the referendum, and democracy per se. In case treatments are endogenously chosen via a democratic decision-making process, the contribution rule significantly increases contributions to the public good. However, democratic participation does not affect participants' contribution behavior directly, after controlling for self-selection of treatments and the information transmitted by voting.
Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public good provision in small open economies characterized by capital mobility and imperfect competition in the labor market. We assume that each national government collects public revenues via taxes on labor, capital and profit income, and that the revenues are spent on a public consumption good and a public input good, where the latter enters the economic system in terms of an `externality production factor'. The overall purposes are to characterize the tax and expenditure policies, if decided upon at the national level, and analyze the welfare effects of policy coordination with respect to taxes and public expenditures. Among the results, we show that tax coordination contributes to higher welfare if it reduces the net interest rate and the wage rate, and that the relative overprovision of the public input good derived by Keen and Marchand (1997) in the context of a competitive economy may no longer hold, if the labor market is non-competitive.
On May 18, 1994, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first genetically engineered food product for commercial sale and dozens of other products are in the pipeline promising to provide a vast array of new agricultural products. But is this development in the best interest of the public? NABC 6 was the first NABC meeting to specifically address the global nature of agriculture. The workshops determined eight comprehensive key issues ranging from ownership and access to germplasm to the need for more unified biosafety standards. ; Biotechnology can have enormous positive impact on public good, but policy issues are critical in determining who benefits from technology transfer on the national and global level. However, we need to see biotechnology as a point on a continuum of technologies and make sure that it does not replace other valid technologies and thus limit the tools available to producers and consumers. ; Certain members of the audience were concerned about negative effects of agricultural biotechnology on human health and the environment, and doubted whether biotechnology can bring universal benefit to developing countries. However, feeding the growing world population using current agricultural practices, the amount of land used for agriculture would have to be expanded from a land mass about the size of South America to that of Eurasia. Increasing agricultural productivity per acre is vital and can be aided by new products developed through agricultural biotechnology. However, public acceptance remains uncertain. Communication and education are important in placing biotechnology solidly on the continuum of technologies and remove the stigma of "Frankenfood". The current trend of removing funding for public research and handing it over to the private sector has the potential of putting possibly lucrative developments squarely in the hands of corporations rather than in those of the public – a type of "biopiracy" that forces producers, especially in developing countries, to pay for patented life forms previously free for them to use.
We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and the village. When districts unite, underprovision persists in the village (and may even become more severe), whereas overprovision of public goods arises in the city as urbanites use their political power to exploit the villagers. From a social welfare point of view, inhabitants of the village have insufficient incentives to vote for unification. We examine how national transfers to local governments can resolve these problems.
