Toward the Public Goods Provision in the Early Modern Economy

Although countries throughout the developing world continue to increase their number of subnational administrative units, the consequences of administrative unit creation remain poorly understood. This paper argues that newly created administrative units face relative difficulty generating resources and staffing a full and competent bureaucracy, and as a result, are less capable of providing public goods to their constituencies. These challenges to administrative capacity are less consequential within mother units that were carved apart to create new splinter units and are entirely absent in nonsplitting units. Proxying the local provision of public goods with a measure of nighttime light intensity in Burkina Faso, the findings indicate that the public goods provision in newly created splinter provinces dropped significantly relative to prefragmentation levels, while other administrative units remained largely unaffected.

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Emergence of Cooperation in Public Goods Problems

Journal of Public Finance and Public Choice ◽

10.1332/251569208x15664517301896 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 26 (1) ◽

pp. 47-61

Author(s):

Dalibor Roháč

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Prisoner's Dilemma ◽

Prisoner’S Dilemma ◽

Public Goods Provision ◽

The Public ◽

Weakest Link ◽

Game Of Chicken ◽

Emergence Of Cooperation ◽

Assurance Game ◽

The Difference

Abstract In this paper, we discuss several issues related to public goods provision. Unlike many Austrians, we do not think that the concept of public goods - or of collective action - is an inherently flawed idea, even though we reject the alleged welfare implications of public goods theory, as proposed by orthodox public finance literature. We then argue that the structure of a generic public goods problem is more a game of chicken or an assurance game than a prisoner's dilemma and that this has important implications with regard to the plausibility of cooperative outcomes. Namely, when the public goods problem has the weakest-link structure and can be represented as an assurance game, then the cooperative outcome will be self-enforcing. In many cases, the public goods problems can be transformed into weakest-link games or different mechanisms can be found to ensure cooperation. We also discuss the difference between a public goods problem and collusion. We assert that, unlike public goods problems, collusive agreements have the structure of a prisoner's dilemma. Overall, our paper suggests that there are reasons to be optimistic about stability and efficiency of stateless societal orders.

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A Theory of Local Public Goods Provision with Congestion: Destroy the Public Good to Produce the Public Good?

SSRN Electronic Journal ◽

10.2139/ssrn.3399632 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Maxime Agbo ◽

Agnès Zabsonré

Keyword(s):

Public Goods ◽

Public Good ◽

Local Public Goods ◽

Public Goods Provision ◽

The Public

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