Public Goods, Environmental Externalities and Fiscal Competition: Selected Papers on Competition, Efficiency and Cooperation in Public Economics

ISBN-13: 9780387255330 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 588 str.

Henry Tulkens; Parkash Chander; C. Knox Lovell

Opis

Over the last forty years, the field of public economics has emerged as a modern successor to public finance. It has gained importance on the research agenda of economists and in the curricula of economics depa- ments. It has become a diversified field, rich in theoretical developments and substantive applications. Beyond the traditional concerns with t- ation or public goods, a number of new concerns have entered the scene, concerning for instance public sector pricing, the management of public firms, social security or federalism. A comprehensive presentation of the field extends nowadays beyond the scope of textbooks and requires access to a growing specialised literature. The present volume, collecting 22 papers published by Henry Tulkens over the period 1978-2003, is offered as an illustration of these new developments. The illustration has three dimensions: approach, s- ject matters and methods. Coming from a single author, admittedly assisted by 18 co-authors, the different papers are illustrative of an underlying general approach, which I like to label ''operational public economics''. With these simple words, I mean an approach under which issues in public economics are formulated so as to capture essential elements of actual situations. Ty- cally, this leads to theoretical models more complex than standard te- book formulations. It is then up to the public economist to extend the theory as needed to fit the situation.

Spis treści

Dynamic processes for public goods.- Surplus-sharing local games in dynamic exchange processes.- Exchange processes, the core and competitive allocations.- Commodity exchanges as gradient processes.- An economic model of international negotiations relating to transfrontier pollution.- Theoretical foundations of negotiations and cost sharing in transfrontier pollution problems.- The acid rain game as a resource allocation process, with application to negotiations between Finland, Russia and Estonia.- The core of an economy with multilateral environmental externalities.- A core-theoretic solution for the design of cooperative agreements on transfrontier pollution.- The Kyoto Protocol.- Simulating coalitionally stable burden sharing agreements for the climate change problem.- Transfers to sustain dynamic core-theoretic cooperation in international stock pollutant control.- Measuring labor-efficiency in post offices.- On FDH efficiency analysis.- Assessing and explaining the performance of public enterprises.- Non-frontier measures of efficiency, progress and regress for time series data.- Nonparametric efficiency, progress and regress measures for panel data.- Efficiency Dominance Analysis.- Commodity tax competition between member states of a federation.- On Pareto improving commodity tax changes under fiscal competition.- Optimality properties of alternative systems of taxation of foreign capital income.- Tax interaction dynamics among Belgian municipalities 1984-1997.

Blurb

The twenty-two papers collected in this volume illustrate the itinerary of Henry Tulkens, an applied theorist, on the occasion of his retirement from teaching.  The collection is structured in four parts:

I.  Decentralized resource allocation processes for public and private goods

II. Environment, public goods and externalities

III. Efficiency analysis

IV. Fiscal competition and optimality

 

The four pictures above evoke a key concept, method or model used in each of these four parts:

> MDP-type processes to determine feasible paths to efficiency and coalitional stability.

> CLIMNEG World Simulation model to explore alternative environmental scenarios for the planet.

> Free Disposal Hull efficiency analysis to drop convexity and help deal with outliers.

> Non Cooperative Fiscal Equilbria to characterize the outcomes of fiscal competition