IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/pubfin/v30y2002i5p385-415.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Public Provision of Indivisible Private Goods in Short Supply

Author

Listed:
  • Dan Usher

    (Queen’s University)

Abstract

Public provision of private goods is usually modeled as the displacement of a market where people can buy as much or as little of a good as they please, with tax-financed provision by the government of equal and identical amounts of the good per person. But public provision is not always equal per person because some goods cannot be supplied equally or because the government does not choose to supply goods equally. There may be fewer organs available for transplant than there are people who need them. The best education and medical care are unavoidably rationed because teachers and doctors differ in skill or dedication. Total public expenditure may be insufficient to provide for everybody when there is a lower limit to useful expenditure per person.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan Usher, 2002. "Public Provision of Indivisible Private Goods in Short Supply," Public Finance Review, , vol. 30(5), pages 385-415, September.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:30:y:2002:i:5:p:385-415
    DOI: 10.1177/109114210203000505
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/109114210203000505
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/109114210203000505?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Usher, Dan, 1977. "The welfare economics of the socialization of commodities," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(2), pages 151-168, October.
    2. Dan Usher, 2002. "Public Provision of Indivisible Private Goods in Short Supply," Public Finance Review, , vol. 30(5), pages 385-415, September.
    3. Epple, Dennis & Romano, Richard E, 1996. "Public Provision of Private Goods," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 104(1), pages 57-84, February.
    4. Garratt, Rod & Marshall, John M, 1994. "Public Finance of Private Goods: The Case of College Education," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(3), pages 566-582, June.
    5. Epple, Dennis & Romano, Richard E., 1996. "Ends against the middle: Determining public service provision when there are private alternatives," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(3), pages 297-325, November.
    6. repec:eee:labchp:v:1:y:1986:i:c:p:641-692 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Kennett, David, 1982. "Standards and Procedures for the Distribution of a Public Service: Shoup Revisited," Public Finance = Finances publiques, , vol. 37(1), pages 80-97.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dan Usher, 2002. "Public Provision of Indivisible Private Goods in Short Supply," Public Finance Review, , vol. 30(5), pages 385-415, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Zanola, Roberto, 2000. "Public goods versus publicly provided private goods in a two-class economy," POLIS Working Papers 12, Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS.
    2. Janet Currie & Firouz Gahvari, 2008. "Transfers in Cash and In-Kind: Theory Meets the Data," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 46(2), pages 333-383, June.
    3. Lülfesmann, Christoph & Myers, Gordon M., 2011. "Two-tier public provision: Comparing public systems," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1263-1271.
    4. Sophia Delipalla & Owen O'Donnell, 1999. "The Political Economy of a Publicly Provided Private Good with Adverse Selection," Studies in Economics 9911, School of Economics, University of Kent.
    5. Dotti, Valerio, 2014. "The Political Economy of Publicly Provided Private Goods," MPRA Paper 54026, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Simona GRASSI, 2006. "On the characteristics of a mixed system of provision of a private good. An application to health care," Departmental Working Papers 2006-14, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    7. Dotti, Valerio, 2019. "The political economy of public education," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 35-52.
    8. Nuscheler, Robert & Roeder, Kerstin, 2015. "Financing and funding health care: Optimal policy and political implementability," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 197-208.
    9. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2014. "Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(2), pages 375-408, June.
    10. Dan Anderberg, 2007. "Inefficient households and the mix of government spending," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 131(1), pages 127-140, April.
    11. Dan Anderberg & Alessandro Balestrino, 2008. "The Political Economy of Post-Compulsory Education Policy with Endogenous Credit Constraints," CESifo Working Paper Series 2304, CESifo.
    12. Meier, Volker & Schiopu, Ioana, 2015. "Optimal higher education enrollment and productivity externalities in a two-sector model," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 1-13.
    13. Franciscos Koutentakis, 2012. "Public Education and Democracy in a Simple Model of Persistent Inequality," Working Papers 1204, University of Crete, Department of Economics.
    14. Di Matteo, Livio, 2000. "The determinants of the public-private mix in Canadian health care expenditures: 1975-1996," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(2), pages 87-112, June.
    15. Pierre-André Jouvet & Philippe Michel & Pierre Pestieau, 2008. "Public and private environmental spending: a political economy approach," Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Springer;Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies - SEEPS, vol. 9(3), pages 177-191, September.
    16. Francisco Martínez Mora, 2003. "Opting-out of Public Education in Urban Economies," Economic Working Papers at Centro de Estudios Andaluces E2003/52, Centro de Estudios Andaluces.
    17. Rainald Borck, 2007. "Voting, Inequality And Redistribution," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(1), pages 90-109, February.
    18. Masuyuki Nishijima, 2009. "Quality And Welfare In Mixed Duopoly: Effects Of Capacity Reduction," The Japanese Economic Review, Japanese Economic Association, vol. 60(1), pages 97-109, March.
    19. Amedeo Piolatto, 2011. "Financing public education: a political economy model with altruistic agents and retirement concerns," Working Papers. Serie AD 2011-12, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    20. Borck, Rainald & Wrohlich, Katharina, 2011. "Preferences for childcare policies: Theory and evidence," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 436-454, September.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:pubfin:v:30:y:2002:i:5:p:385-415. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.