In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done "work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation," the theory of public expenditure had been "relatively neglected" (1958, 332). Anglo-American...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...