Les impôts locaux sont-ils gaspillés?

Although public economists generally agree on the fact that the gap between the positive approach of local public choices on the one hand and their normative approach on the other hand entails the existence of potential pareto improvements in public expenditures, it seems that they still lack an adequate method to determine how important are these potential improvements. This paper is aimed at, partly, remedying these shortcomings and more specifically focuses on cost inefficiencies in the production of local public goods and services. Indeed, such inefficiencies are undoubtedly pareto inefficiencies and, therefore, are responsible for a waste of fiscal resources. A parametric method based on the implementation of the econometric concept of stochastic frontier to the microeconomic concept of money metric utility is developed and used to detect and measure cost inefficiencies in the context of the well known median voter model. An application to local public expenditures for French cities is then proposed.