This book was prepared mainly for specialists on the assumption that it would provide the background to an important neglected field of discussion in public finance. Since it was first published in 1958, the theory of public goods and its implications for public policy have become incorporated in the main body of the economic analysis of public finance in the literature. A glance at the footnotes of some of the standard textbooks on public finance indicates that this assembly of articles has not been in vain. Probably the most influential part of this collection has been the papers concerned with the theory of public expenditure, which contains two closely related elements. The first is as a part of welfare economics: under what conditions can Pareto optimality be achieved in an economic system in which some goods supplied are indivisible? The other strand of thought is concerned with the positive theory of the public sector: how can economic analysis be used in order to explain how the size and composition of the budget is actually determined?

Featuring a general equilibrium framework that is both cohesive and versatile, the Second Edition of Public Finance: A Normative Theory brings new and updated information to this classic text. Through its concentration on the microeconomic theory of the public sector in the context of capitalist market economics it addresses the subjects traditionally at the heart of public sector economics, including public good theory, theory of taxation, welfare analysis, externalities, tax incidence, cost benefit analysis, and fiscal federalism. Its goal of providing a foundation, rather than attempting to present the most recent scholarship in detail, makes this Second Edition both a valuable text and a resource for professionals. * Second edition provides new and updated information * Focuses on the heart of public sector economics, including public expenditure theory and policy, tax theory and policy, cost benefit-analysis, and fiscal federalism * Features a cohesive and versatile general equilibrium framework

The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.

Rejecting conventional approaches, the author offers a view of public finance as one element of a broader scheme of social theorizing. The book assumes a working knowledge of the standard conceptual framework within which the theory of public finance is commonly presented.

Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.

Useful for Graduate and P.G. Students of Economics and Candidates Appearing for Competitive Examinations. It examines every major problem of the economy of public sector first in the context of the developed countries of the western world and then their relevence is looked into from the angle of the developing countries.

The central question of this book is whether the assignment of government functions to the individual jurisdictions in a federal state can ensure an optimal allocation of resources and a fair income distribution. The analysis thereby gives a new answer to the old question about the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization in a federal state. It shows that fiscal decentralization is a method to disclose the preferences of currently living and future generations for local public goods, to limit the size of the government, and to avoid excessive public debt finance. While the allocative branch of the government benefits from fiscal decentralization, it is difficult to obtain a distribution of incomes that differs from the outcome that the market brings along.

The events of the last decade have challenged the contemporary neo-classical synthesis in all branches of economics, but particularly public finance. The most notable feature of the 2nd edition of Public Finance in Theory and Practice is the infusion of behavioral economics throughout the text, with an end of chapter question inviting the student to apply a behavioral lens to some question or issue. There continues to be an emphasis on the importance of the institutional context, drawing on examples from many countries and emphasizing the role of lower level governments in a federal system. The first five chapters establish this context by reviewing the role of government in a market system, the description of government structure from an economic perspective, the basic data about revenue and expenditures, the elements of public choice, and the distributional role of government. The book has been substantially reorganized to put more emphasis on public expenditure. Expanded treatment of public goods includes common property resources and congestible or club goods. Expanded discussion of budgeting and cost-benefit analysis provides some practical application of the theory. Updated discussions of social security, public education and health care address these three major contemporary public finance issues. The traditional emphasis on revenue (taxes, fees and grants) has been retained but follows rather than precedes the discussion of expenditures.