دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تغییرات جمعیت و قوانین تنظیم خدمات دولتی گسسته و حمایت از کالاهای عمومی - Sage 2017

Abstract

Cities with declining populations face increasing per-capita costs to maintain discrete public goods—those with fixed costs that cannot be easily scaled to demand. Likewise, growing cities may face decreasing benefits from congestible public goods. In either case, there are two policy actions: limit access (ration) or expand output (higher revenues per person required). We report the results of a series of experiments designed to investigate the effect of alternative rationing rules on the propensity for individuals to support increases in taxes to overcome congestion externalities or decreases in the tax base.

Conclusion

Increasing demand for congestible public goods or changing demand for discrete public goods may cause a demand-driven growth in per-capita government expenditure. Thus, this provides a motive for growth of government spending that is not supply-side driven (e.g., bureaucratic excesses). We find that the behavioral response, support for tax increases, is determined by the rationing rule imposed to deal with congestion in public goods provision. Contrary to behavior theories of risk-aversion, loss-aversion, or rank-dependent expected utility, we find in scenarios where demand was increasing or decreasing for a quasi-public good that voters were more likely to support a tax increase if the alternative was a small, guaranteed reduction access to the good rather than if there was a likelihood of being excluded from consuming the good entirely. This finding is consistent with reports from the behavioral literature that people exhibit status quo bias and overconfidence. Voters may prefer to take a chance on the status quo rather than accept higher taxes to maintain aggregate levels of public good services. If robust, such a result could contribute to explanations of why some people seemingly vote against their own self-interest (voting against tax breaks on the wealthy due to overconfidence about becoming wealthy) or against principles of loss aversion (e.g., opposing health-care reforms that increase access to insurance but increase congestion of medical resources is a case of choosing potential exclusion over a proportional reduction).