《财政学教学资料》ch04.docVIP

Chapter 4 Public Goods Instructional Objectives Chapter 4 discusses the properties of public goods. The concept of a pure public good is developed and contrasted with the concept of a pure private good. Many examples are given to help students understand the important differences between these two types of goods. In addition, students are shown the important distinction between the demand curves for pure public goods and pure private goods. Throughout the?chapter, the theory of externalities is applied to emphasize the fact that market provision of pure public goods is unlikely to be an efficient alternative. Intermediate cases between pure public goods and pure private goods are also analyzed. Congestible public goods and price-excludable public goods are explicitly considered along with many examples of other intermediate cases. The goal here is to make students aware of the fact that it is difficult to generalize about actual arrangements used to provide public goods. An important goal of this chapter is to derive the efficiency conditions for a pure public good. In deriving these conditions, I emphasize the external benefit associated with the provision of pure public goods. In this way, students see that consumption of a unit of a pure public good by any one person results in external benefits to all others. A pure public good, therefore, requires the annual output up to the point at which the sum of the marginal benefits of all consumers equals the marginal costs of making the good available. The sum of the individual marginal benefits is the marginal social benefit of each unit of the pure public good. An extended numerical example dealing with the provision of security protection in a small community is used to derive the efficiency conditions and to illustrate a Lindahl equilibrium. The model of cooperative supply for a pure public good shows the student how the efficient output of a pure public good could be provided in a small community without governme