This study considers three questions: 1. What are the Canadian public's prioritization preferences for new government spending on a range of public health-related goods outside the scope of the country's national system of health insurance? 2. How homogenous or heterogeneous is the Canadian public in terms of these preferences? 3. What factors are predictive of the Canadian public's preferences...

We analyze effects of public debt in a basic endogenous growth model with productive public spending. We demonstrate that a discretionary policy violates the inter-temporal government budget constraint along a balanced growth path. A balanced government budget gives a unique saddle point stable growth path. With a rule based policy, two saddle point stable balanced growth paths can occur, depen...

This chapter is about public spending, and how to assess who benefits from it. It describes benefit incidence analysis, highlights good practice, and provides some guidance on how to estimate and interpret its results. Public subsidies are justified on a number of grounds. Market failure and the presence of pure public goods call for government intervention on efficiency grounds. But the case f...

During the past ~o years, fiscal troubles in New England have severely limited state governments’ ability to increase funding for elementary and secondary schooling. Despite growing concerns about the quality of public education, two states, Connecticut and New Hampshire, cut inflation-adjusted K-12 spending in Fiscal Year 1992 (FY92) and FY93 (Chart 1). The other four cut spending in one of th...