Is public expenditure productive

http://down.aefweb.net/WorkingPapers/w77.pdf

The composition of public expenditure and economic growth

The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these axioms. They exhibit sensitivity to the present and to the long-run future, and specify trade-offs between them. It examines other welfare criteria which are generally utilized: discounted utility, lim inf. long run averages, overtaking and catching-up criteria, Ramsey's criterion, Rawlsian rules, and the criterion of satisfaction of basic needs, and finds that none satisfies the axioms for sustainability. Theorem 2 gives a characterization of all continuous independent sustainable preferences. Theorem 3 shows that in general sustainable growth paths cannot be approximated by paths which approximate discounted optima. Proposition 1 shows that paths which maximize the present value under a standard price system may fail to reach optimal sustainable welfare levels, and Example 4 that the two criteria can give rise to different value systems.

An axiomatic approach to sustainable development

The current crisis in international lending points up a lesson re-learned several times in the past 150 years: the international loan markets function very differently from the textbook model of competitive lending. This paper discusses various extensions of the basic model.First, we amend the textbook model to show how limitations on a government'staxing authority may greatly affect its optimal borrowing strategy.Second, we explore the implications of adebtor country's option to repudiate debt.Third, we show that efficient lending may require collective actions by bank syndicates, and that a breakdown in collective action can result in serious inefficiencies and even financial panics.

/pdf/theoretical-issues-in-international-borrowing-4cp8c4hqb4.pdf

Theoretical issues in international borrowing

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that the economy is convex, nor do we assume that the government optimizes on behalf of its citizens. We show that the same set of accounting prices should be used both for policy evaluation and for assessing whether or not intergenerational welfare along a given economic path will be sustained. We also show that a comprehensive measure of wealth, computed in terms of the accounting prices, can be used as an index for problems (2) and (3) above. The remainder of the paper is concerned with rules for estimating the accounting prices of several specific environmental natural resources, transacted in a few well known economic institutions.

/pdf/evaluating-projects-and-assessing-sustainable-development-in-3fbskc0mfq.pdf

G. K. Shaw

Papers

Public Investment, the Rate of Return, and Optimal Fiscal Policy