The Endogenization Of Government Behaviour In Macroeconomic Models

In chapter 2 we concluded that the present public choice and marxist approaches to the study of political processes, as far as relevant for the analysis of economic policy making, are unsatisfactory, for reasons of incoherency, insufficient empirical support, and lack of specificity~ It was suggested that a different approach to the subject might be fruitful. To that purpose, we now turn our attention to the so-called interest function approach to the study of politico-economic phenomena, that has been developed by Van Winden (1983). See also Van Winden (1987), Van Velthoven and Van Winden (1986). Without paying too much attention to the specific conduct of and intricate relationships between voters, politicians, bureaucrats and interest groups, the interest function approach intends to combine valuable elements of the marxist and public choice analyses. According to Van Winden (1983, p. 12) "this means that in studying the interaction between state and private sector, attention should be paid to: - social classes, and the impact of class/power relationships on political and economic processes; - the way that social power structures (involving the real control over state activities) are maintained or altered; - the relative autonomy of political processes (involving the state) and its consequences for, as well as its dependence on economic processes; - individual motivations; - the possibility of mathematical formalization. " Section 3. 2. will give a general introduction to the concepts and the line of argument of the interest function approach.

project was the development and application of a model of central and local government behavior. It was carried out in collaboration with the Dutch Department of Home Affairs, during the period September 1985 - April 1987. The project's aim was the study of the determinants of local government decisionmaking in the Netherlands and the implications of so-called intergovernmental relations for local government behavior. During that project I was assisted by Sander Helder and Marc Tigche1aar. The results of that project appeared in a book, co-authored by Frans van Winden, entitled Gemeentefinancien en Gedecentra1iseerde. Bes1uitvorming(Loca1 Public Finance and Decentralized Decisionmaking). This book is, for the time being, the end product of my research on government behavior. Much more research is needed on the study of government behavior and the application of models which, from an economic point of view, focus on the implications of the interaction between economics and politics. The knowledge of this process is not only interesting as such, but also from a practical point of view. without a good positive analysis of the behavior of the government in modern industrialized economies it is neither possible to see through its operations nor to use its policies as an effective instrument in the pursuit of economic targets.

The problems arising from the existence of asymmetric information in public decision making have been widely explored by economists. Most of the traditional analysis of public sector activities has been reviewed to take accountofthe possible distortions arising from an asymmetric distribution of relevant information among the actors of the public decision-making process. A normative approach has been developed to design incentive schemes which tackle adverse selection and moral hazard problems within public organisations: our understanding of these problems is now much better, and some of the mechanisms designed have had important practical implications. While this analysis is still under way in many fields of public economics, as the papers by Jones and Zanola, and Trimarchi witness, a debate is ongoing on the possible theoretical limitations ofthis approach and on its actual relevance for public sector activities. This book encompasses different contributions to these issues, on both theoretical and practical areas, which were firstly presented at a conference in Catania. The innermost problem in the current discussion arises from the fact that this normative analysis is firmly rooted in the complete contracting framework, with the consequence that, despite the analytical complexities of most models, their results rely on very simplified assumptions. Most complexities of the organisation of public sector, and more generally, of writing "contracts", are therefore swept away.

"Is the business cycle obsolete?" This often cited title of a book edited by Bronfenbren ner with the implicit affirmation of the question reflected the attitude of mainstream macroeconomics in the 1960s regarding the empirical relevance of cyclic motions of an economy. The successful income policies, theoretically grounded in Keynesian macroec onomics, seemed to have eased or even abolished the fluctuations in Western economies which motivated studies of many classical and neoclassical economists for more than 100 years. The reasoning behind the conviction that business cycles would increasingly be come irrelevant was rather simple: if an economy fluctuates for whatever reason, then it is almost always possible to neutralize these cyclic motions by means of anticyclic demand policies. From the 1950s until the mid-1960s business cycle theory had often been consid ered either as an appendix to growth theory or as an academic exercise in dynamical economics. The common business cycle models were essentially multiplier-accelerator models whose dependence on particular parameter values (in order to exhibit oscillatory motion) suggested a rather improbable occurrence of persistent fluctuations. The obvi ous success in compensating business cycles in those days prevented intensive concern with the occurrence of cycles. Rather, business cycle theory turned into stabilization theory which investigated theoretical possibilities of stabilizing a fluctuating economy. Many macroeconomic textbooks appeared in the 1960s which consequently identified business cycle theory with inquiries on the possibilities to stabilize economies by means of active fiscal or monetary policies.

This book is a fully revised and updated version of Hans van den Doel's Democracy and Welfare Economics. It presents the economic theory of political decision-making (otherwise known as new political economy, or public choice), providing students with an accessible and clear introduction to this important subject. The authors identify four different methods of decision-making by which the political process transforms the demands of individual citizens into government policy, and these are analyzed in turn with reference to economic theory.

This book is the result of five years of research that I carried out as a research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam. The project was initiated in 1986 by Frans van Winden and Roy Thurik. Frans van Winden became interested in self employment through his work concerning government behavior. In the models that he employs, the government is influenced by various social groups, the political strength of which is related to their size. As one of these is the group of self-employed individuals, he became interested in determinants of the size of this group. Roy Thurik was professionally interested in the subject because of his work at the Research Institute for Small and Medium-sized Business in the Netherlands (EIM), an institute that does much research in this area. Together, they wrote a proposal for a research project, for which they received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs . These funds were supplemented by the University of Amsterdam and at a later stage by the Organization for the Advancement of Research in the Economic Discipline (ECOZOEK), that is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This support is gratefully acknowiedged. The commercial edition of this book was partIy financed by the Centre for Energy Conservation and Environmental Technology (CE), the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decisionmaking (CREED), and the University of Amsterdam.