IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sfu/sfudps/dp07-20.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Dual Provision of Public Policies in Democracy

Author

Abstract

This paper analyzes the provision of goods with consumption externalities (such as public policies) in hybrid settings: the `good' is provided in a democratic process by majority vote, but each individual agent is free to contribute additional amounts before or after the political decision has been made. Prominent examples include policy making in federal states, charities, and dual provision of health care. We show that regardless of the timing of private and public actions, the results of the median voter theorem apply. A move from a purely public system to a dual system with private ex-ante contributions is shown to be unambiguously preferred by everybody in society. In contrast, establishing an ex-post contribution regime may be opposed by a minority of high-preference individuals. The paper also derives results for a scenario with endogenous timing of private contributions. Most importantly, this general regime is shown to be majority preferred not only to the systems with ex-post and the ex-ante contributions, but also to an institutional setting with private but no public provision.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Luelfesmann, 2007. "Dual Provision of Public Policies in Democracy," Discussion Papers dp07-20, Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University.
    • Handle: RePEc:sfu:sfudps:dp07-20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sfu.ca/repec-econ/sfu/sfudps/dp07-20.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dennis Epple & Richard Romano, 2003. "Collective Choice and Voluntary Provision of Public Goods," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(2), pages 545-572, May.
    2. Stiglitz, J. E., 1974. "The demand for education in public and private school systems," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(4), pages 349-385, November.
    3. Gerhard Glomm & B. Ravikumar, 1998. "Opting out of publicly provided services: A majority voting result," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 15(2), pages 187-199.
    4. Richard Cornes & Roger Hartley & Todd Sandler, 1999. "Equilibrium Existence and Uniqueness in Public Good Models: An Elementary Proof via Contraction," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 1(4), pages 499-509, October.
    5. Bergstrom, Theodore & Blume, Lawrence & Varian, Hal, 1986. "On the private provision of public goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 25-49, February.
    6. 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.
    7. Fraser, Clive D., 1992. "The uniqueness of Nash equilibrium in the private provision of public goods : An alternative proof," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 389-390, December.
    8. Rubinchik-Pessach, Anna, 2005. "Can decentralization be beneficial?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 89(7), pages 1231-1249, July.
    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. Hagemann, Harald & Kufenko, Vadim, 2014. "The political Kuznets curve for Russia: Income inequality, rent seeking regional elites and empirical determinants of protests during 2011/2012," Violette Reihe: Schriftenreihe des Promotionsschwerpunkts "Globalisierung und Beschäftigung" 39/2013, University of Hohenheim, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Evangelisches Studienwerk.

    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. Lülfesmann, Christoph & Myers, Gordon M., 2011. "Two-tier public provision: Comparing public systems," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(11), pages 1263-1271.
    3. Tetsuo Ono, 2015. "Public education and social security: a political economy approach," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 16(1), pages 1-25, February.
    4. Yuki Uchida & Tetsuo Ono, 2020. "Inequality and education choice," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 27(4), pages 980-1018, August.
    5. Levy, Gilat, 2004. "Public education for the minority, private education for the majority," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 3617, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    6. Tetsuo Ono, 2016. "Inequality and the politics of redistribution," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 23(2), pages 191-217, April.
    7. Buckley, Neil & Cuff, Katherine & Hurley, Jeremiah & Mestelman, Stuart & Thomas, Stephanie & Cameron, David, 2016. "Should I stay or should I go? Exit options within mixed systems of public and private health care finance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 131(PB), pages 62-77.
    8. Gilat Levy, 2005. "The Politics of Public Provision of Education," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(4), pages 1507-1534.
    9. Bhattacharya, Sukanta & Saha, Sarani & Banerjee, Sarmila, 2016. "Income inequality and the quality of public services: A developing country perspective," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 123(C), pages 1-17.
    10. Piolatto, Amedeo, 2010. "Education and selective vouchers," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 29(6), pages 993-1004, December.
    11. Anderberg, Dan, 2013. "Post-compulsory education: Participation and politics," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 134-150.
    12. Nicola Acocella & Giovanni Di Bartolomeo, 2010. "Conflict of interest and coordination in public good provision," Politica economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 3, pages 389-408.
    13. Kimura, Masako & Yasui, Daishin, 2009. "Public provision of private child goods," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(5-6), pages 741-751, June.
    14. Cormac O'Dea & Ian Preston, 2012. "The distributional impact of public spending in the UK," IFS Working Papers W12/06, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    15. Jorge Soares, "undated". "Altruism and Self-interest in a Political Economy of Public Education," Working Papers 130, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    16. John Hall & Ian Preston, 1998. "Public and private choice in UK health insurance," IFS Working Papers W98/19, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    17. Daniel Montolio (University of Barcelona (UB) and Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB)) & Amedeo Piolatto (University of Barcelona (UB) and Barcelona Institute of Economics (IEB)), 2011. "Financing public education when altruistic agents have retirement concerns," Working Papers in Economics 268, Universitat de Barcelona. Espai de Recerca en Economia.
    18. Kotchen, Matthew J., 2007. "Equilibrium existence and uniqueness in impure public good models," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 97(2), pages 91-96, November.
    19. Rainald Borck, 2007. "Voting, Inequality And Redistribution," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(1), pages 90-109, February.
    20. Dennis Epple & Richard Romano, 2003. "Collective Choice and Voluntary Provision of Public Goods," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(2), pages 545-572, May.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Public goods; Majority voting; private provision; dual provision; federalism; charities; health care.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D02 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Institutions: Design, Formation, Operations, and Impact
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • H40 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - General
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:sfu:sfudps:dp07-20. 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: Working Paper Coordinator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/desfuca.html .

    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.