The book is the first of its kind to provide a comparative analysis of the provision of social and public services in France, Italy, Germany, the UK and Norway. This volume, co-authored by leading national experts, topically examines whether, when, how and why the delivery of social and public services, which was historically a responsibility of local authorities, has been significantly shifted to marketized and commodified forms. However, despite this considerable change, there have been recent indications of remunicipalisation in some sectors. Combining both cross-country and cross-policy co.

Local Provision of Public Services: The Tiebout Model after Twenty-Five Years describes several theoretical and empirical branches of economic research related to Charles Tiebout's provocative hypothesis that consumer mobility and interjurisdictional competition result in an efficient allocation of resources to the local public sector. The book provides insights on the issues being considered in policy debates regarding the appropriate means of providing essential public services. Chapters in the book include an overview of the Tiebout model; income redistribution in a federal system; empirical relationships in the political economy of local public finance; and two conflicting views of the incidence of the property tax. Economists, local government leaders, and experts in public finance will find the book very insightful.

A Brookings Institution Press, Committee for Economic Development, and Urban Institute Press publication For decades, the use of vouchers has been widely debated. But often lost in the heat of debate is the fact that vouchers are just another tool in the government's tool chest, a restricted subsidy that falls somewhere between the extremes of cash and direct government provision of services. The instrument itself is not new—the 1944 GI Bill of Rights was a voucher, and vouchers for food, college aid, and housing have been in place for decades. Until now, however, the study of vouchers has been restricted to a few controversial applications. This volume, which grew out of a conference sponsored by the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, and the Committee for Economic Development, fills the gap, offering a framework for comparative analysis of specific policy issues related to vouchers. Its 16 essays address the economics, politics, and legal issues of voucher use and explore how vouchers are currently employed in the United States and abroad for education, child care, job training, housing, and health care. C. Eugene Steuerle is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and has worked under four different U.S. presidents on a variety of reform issues in such areas as social security, budget, tax, and health policy. Robert D. Reischauer, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, was director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995. George Peterson is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute; from 1976 to 1985 he directed the Institute's Public Finance Research Center. Van Doorn Ooms, senior vice president and director of research at the Committee for Economic Development, was formerly executive director for policy and chief economist of the Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Representatives, 1989-1990, and was the Budget Committee's chief economist from 1981 to 1988.

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both over time and across space, we examine public bus service, which represents a standardized output for benchmarking the cost of local government service provision. There is significant dispersion across transit agencies in the operating cost per bus mile with the highest being more than three times as high as the lowest among top 20 largest cities by population. We estimate the cost savings from privatization and explore the political economy of why privatization rates are lower in high cost unionized areas. Our analysis finds that the full privatizaton could result in cost savings of $5.7 billion in 2011 and that the gain in economic efficiency from more closely aligning bus fares with production costs would be worth at least half a billion dollars.

This open access book explores new research directions in social inequality and urban segregation. With the goal of fostering an ongoing dialogue between scholars in Europe and China, it brings together an impressive team of international researchers to shed light on the entwined processes of inequality and segregation, and the implications for urban development. Through a rich collection of empirical studies at the city, regional and national levels, the book explores the impact of migration on cities, the related problems of social and spatial segregation, and the ramifications for policy reform. While the literature on both segregation and inequality has traditionally been dominated by European and North American studies, there is growing interest in these issues in the Chinese context. Economic liberalization, rapid industrial restructuring, the enormous growth of cities, and internal migration, have all reshaped the country profoundly. What have we learned from the European and North American experience of segregation and inequality, and what insights can be gleaned to inform the bourgeoning interest in these issues in the Chinese context? How is China different, both in terms of the nature and the consequences of segregation inequality, and what are the implications for future research and policy? Given the continued rise of China’s significance in the world, and its recent declaration of war on poverty, this book offers a timely contribution to scholarship, identifying the core insights to be learned from existing research, and providing important guidance on future directions for policy makers and researchers.