Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Recent Experiences with Consolidation ...................................................................................................................... 4 Consolidation and the Costs of Delivering Government Ser...

Public spending programs aimed at alleviating poverty can either be broadly targeted at categories of spending or narrowly targeted at types of people. Each approach has benefits and costs to the poor. It is often claimed that narrow targeting of the poor will allow governments to reduce poverty more effectively and at lower cost. But narrow targeting often has hidden costs, and once these cost...

In models of economic geography, plant-level scale economies and trade costs create incentives for spatial agglomeration of production into a manufacturing core and agricultural periphery, creating regional income differentials. We examine tax competition between national governments to influence the location of manufacturing activity. Labour is imperfectly mobile and governments impose redistr...

Competition among regional governments may lead to suboptimal levels of capital taxation, as governments ignore the external benefits of capital flight to other regions. However, there have been few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the resulting efficiency losses. This paper presents extensive calculations of the efficiency costs over a wide range of parameter scenarios and assumptions abo...

This paper examines the tax implications of systems of care for psychiatric patients that rely more on the provision of services in the community rather than in state hospitals. State governments pay the costs of patient care in state hospitals, but share costs with the federal government (via Medicaid) for community based care. Taxes create distortions as gauged by the marginal cost of public ...

Prompted in part by constrained national budgets, European governments are increasingly partnering with the private sector to underwrite the costs of constructing and operating public hospitals and other health care facilities and delivering services. Through such public-private partnerships, governments hope to avoid up-front capital expenditure and to harness private-sector efficiencies, whil...

The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has good impact on performance of businesses. Keeping a successful implementation of e-business in mind, governments decided to use ICT in public affairs in order to improve the performance of public sector organizations in the form of providing best possible information and services to citizens, businesses and other governments. With th...

This dissertation asks the question to what extent functional policy-making authority allocations determine the applying of successful policy instruments by local governments in optimising their ability to provide local public goods given system specific transaction costs. I will develop a model to formulate the contextual relations and the behavioral uncertainties related to the employment of ...