Disputes over the marginal cost of public funds may be about its magnitude in any given time and place or about its role in cost-benefit analysis. This paper is about the latter. The Samuelson rule was devised for an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent government. This paper is about how the...

The authors extend the Ahmad and Stern (1984) framework for calculating the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) for excise taxes in Thailand by incorporating non-tax distortions caused by (a) environmental externalities, (b) public expenditure externalities, (c) market power in setting prices,...

There still seems to be some confusion about the consequences of normalisations in the optimal taxation literature. We claim that:1) Normalisations do not matter for the real solution of optimal taxation problem.2) Normalisations do matter for good characterisations of the solutions to optimal...

An expression for the welfare cost of a marginal increase in the public debt is derived using a simple AK endogenous growth model. This measure of the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) can be interpreted as the marginal benefit-cost ratio that a debt-financed public project needs in order to...

This paper reviews the relationship, or lack of it, between two bodies of literature dealing, respectively, with cost-benefit analysis and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). It argues that, while there are no simple answers to the question of how, or to what extent, different methods of...

Decentralised decisions, to a bureau with a given budget, about the production of public goods is analysed within a general equilibrium model with a representative agent and no pure profits. It is shown that decentralisation (i) does not necessarily imply aggregate production effciency and (ii)...

The marginal cost of public funds is the equilibrium price at the intersection of the appropriately-defined demand curve for and the supply curve of public expenditure. In a world with identical people and with no excess burden of taxation, that price would have to be 1. Otherwise the median...

The paper focuses on the signaling value of a tax when agents are less informed than the government on the effect of their consumption. The policy making process is analyzed as a game in which the government wants to influence consumers' behaviors through tax policy, consumers being rational and...

There still seems to be some confusion about the consequences of normalisations in the optimal taxation litterature. We claim that: 1) Normalisations do not matter for the real solution of optimal taxation problem. 2) Normalisations do matter for good characterisations of the solutions to...