Preferences and demand for local public goods : misplaced emphasis?

• Autor(a) principal: Pereira, Paulo Trigo
• Data de Publicação: 1991
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/9521
• topic: Empirical Research; Public Economy; Decision-Making at a Local Level; State of Technology; Property Rights; Ethical Values

This paper is intended to analyse the relevance of the empirical research on the revelation of preferences and demand estimation for «local public goods», according to the processes of decision-making at a local level. Therefore does not consider normative aspects of optimality and efficiency in the local public sector which have been analysed elsewhere [Rubinfeld (1987) and Wildasin (1987)]. Under the label «local public goods>> are in fact two sets of goods. Firstly there are those which (according to the actual state of technology) under any arrangement of property rights, no mechanism of exclusion can be introduced 501 at a reasonable cost. Consequently they will be provided publicly or not at all. Secondly there are those which according to the arrangement of property rights can be provided publicly or as club goods. The efficiency criterion supports the club good arrangement, so the public provision option must be grounded on other ethical values shared by the community.