This paper compares and analyses the use of market mechanisms in core sub-central policy areas, namely education, health care, transport, social protection, and environment. Arrangements like tendering, outsourcing, user choice and competition, user fees and performance-related funding can help...

This paper extends Boadway and Keen (1993)'s work in several ways, in particular by considering two public goods, a pure public good and a good with redistributive characteristics. Under this new characterisation, it shows that is still possible to join an allocation of goods which corresponds...

The goal of this paper is to present an optimal resource allocation model for the regional allocation of public service inputs. The proposed solution leads to maximise the relative public service availability in regions located below the best availability frontier, subject to exogenous budget...

Government may provide a good that can, if legally permitted, be supplemented by private purchases. Policy is determined by majority rule. Under standard assumptions on preferences, a majority voting equilibrium exists. A regime of positive government provision with no restriction on private...

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals.However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with...

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Federalism as Creative Politics -- 2. Federalism, Public Goods, and Taxes -- 3. Representatives' Positions and Collective Decisions -- 4. Read Our Lips, No New (Income) Taxes -- 5. Tax and Spend or Spending Taxes- Economic Development in the States --...