Public Economics

A rigorous, self-contained textbook covering all the central topics in public economics.

Many important economic and political debates today refer to the nature and the role of the State: should governments intervene in the economy and interfere with the operation of markets? In which occasions, and how? In order to better understand these questions and the controversies they have raised, this book re-considers the debates crucial for the issues at stake, the most important schools of thought, and the central concepts in an historical perspective. After a tribute to Sir Alan Peacock and the first publication of two hitherto unpublished papers written in the 1950s, the chapters focus on important developments that occurred in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The final part includes contributions on public economics after World War II, focusing on concepts such as merit goods, externalities and the “Coase theorem”. This book was originally published as a special issue of The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

Scholars, students and teachers of public economics will welcome this volume that, by making some of the key contributions in the field more widely accessible, will provoke discussion, debate and further research.

Public Economics: A Concise Introduction provides a concise and non-technical overview of the role of government in the economy. Using the questions ‘why?’, ‘what for?’ and ‘how?’, the text initially surveys the place of the public sector in a market economy. It then considers the possible reasons which could justify government involvement. Next, the book examines the aims of state economic activity, and the instruments which a government has at its disposal. Lastly, the final chapter provides an illuminating tour of economic history and history of economic thought in relation to government economic activity. The book offers an international focus throughout, with examples taken from all over the globe. Readers are supported with a range of pedagogical features, including example boxes, chapter objectives and summaries, and end-of-chapter multiple choice and reflection questions. Public Economics: A Concise Introduction will be a valuable text for students on courses in public economics, welfare economics, public finance, public policy and related areas.

This comprehensive and thought-provoking Handbook reviews public sector economics from pluralist perspectives that either complement or reach beyond mainstream views. The book takes a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, drawing on economi

A new edition of a comprehensive text, updated throughout, with new material on behavioral economics, international taxation, cost-benefit analysis, and the economics of climate policy. Public economics studies how government taxing and spending activities affect the economy—economic efficiency and the distribution of income and wealth. This comprehensive text on public economics covers the core topics of market failure and taxation as well as recent developments in both policy and the academic literature. It is unique not only in its broad scope but in its balance between public finance and public choice and its combination of theory and relevant empirical evidence. The book covers the theory and methodology of public economics; presents a historical and theoretical overview of the public sector; and discusses such topics as departures from efficiency (including imperfect competition and asymmetric information), issues in political economy, equity, taxation, fiscal federalism, and tax competition among independent jurisdictions. Suggestions for further reading, from classic papers to recent research, appear in each chapter, as do exercises. The mathematics has been kept to a minimum without sacrificing intellectual rigor; the book remains analytical rather than discursive. This second edition has been thoroughly updated throughout. It offers new chapters on behavioral economics, limits to redistribution, international taxation, cost-benefit analysis, and the economics of climate policy. Additional exercises have been added and many sections revised in response to advice from readers of the first edition.

Economic models in much of the public economics literature have been slow to reflect the significant changes towards double-income households throughout the developed world. This graduate-level text develops a more sophisticated approach to household economics, one that allows for multiple-income earners and shared decision-making. This approach is used to present a fundamentally new view of consumption. It then applies this to an analysis of tax systems, combining theoretical analysis of optimal taxation and tax reform with careful empirical study of the characteristics of income tax systems in four different countries: Australia, Germany, the UK and the USA. The book is particularly concerned with analysing, both theoretically and empirically, the impact of taxation on female labour supply, and identifying its effects on work incentives and fairness of income distribution. All this adds up to a fascinating new approach to the economics of household for researchers in both public and private sectors.

Today, the most pressing challenges for public economics are of macroeconomic nature: pensions, debt, income distribution, and fiscal sustainability. All these problems are compounded by the phenomenon of demographic transition and aging. This graduate textbook addresses these issues with the help of state-of-the-art macroeconomic tools that are based on a sound microfoundation and rooted in empirical evidence. Different from the standard partial-equilibrium analysis in traditional textbooks on public economics, the concept of general equilibrium helps to account for compensating or amplifying side-effects of economic policy. GAUSS and MATLAB computer code as well as teaching material (slides) are available as downloads from the author's homepage.