Introduction to the thematic issue on government‐provided services

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12464
• Author: Rim Lahmandi‐Ayed,Helmuth Cremer,Rabah Amir
• Published date: 01 August 2020
• Date: 01 August 2020

J Public Econ Theory. 2020;22:839–844. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jpet © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC

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DOI: 10.1111/jpet.12464

INTRODUCTION

Introduction to the thematic issue on

government‐provided services

Rabah Amir

1,2

|Helmuth Cremer

3

|Rim Lahmandi‐Ayed

4

1

University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA

2

IMéRA and AMSE, Aix-Marseille Université, France

3

Toulouse School of Economics, University of Toulouse Capitole, Toulouse, France

4

ESSAI and U.R. MASE‐ESSAI, University of Carthage, Tunisia

Correspondence

Rabah Amir, Department of Economics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

Email: rabah-amir@uiowa.edu

This Thematic Issue of the Journal of Public Economic Theory is dedicated to the study of

government‐provided services, a topic central to the very genesis of public economics as a

separate field of economics.While specific conditions reflect a lot of cross‐country variability, it

still remains true that, in many countries, a significant number of critically important services

are typically provided wholly or mostly by the public sector. For a partial list, one may mention

national defense, law enforcement, education (all types and at all levels), pension programs,

employment insurance, health insurance, transportation, energy and other utilities, parks and

city squares, and so forth. With many of these services often also provided by the private sector,

the coexistence and the often‐regulated competition between the two are often topics of par-

ticular interest to public economists, and the literature includes a plethora of articles on the

topic, taking both positive and/or normative perspectives.

This Issue joins two recent special issues of this Journal dedicated to various facets of the

core area of public goods, and celebrating the pioneering work on this topic by James Andreoni,

Theodore Bergstrom, Larry Blume, and Hal Varian (see Bochet et al., 2019 and Bochet et al.,

2020). Finally, there are three other papers initially meant to be part of this Issue that ended up

being transferred to regular issues of JPET; these are Kifmann and Roeder (2019), Klimaviciute

(2019), and Lehmann (2020).

This Thematic Issue gathers 13 articles on the general topic of government‐provided ser-

vices, all of which were treated exactly like regular submissions, and thus went through the

standard rigorous refereeing process.

The first two papers, by Fan, Yu, and Pestieau (2020) and Jahandideh (2020), deal with the

government's overall process of optimally allocating its funds to the various goods and services

that it provides to the public.

The next three papers, written by Leroux and Ponthiere (2020), Fels (2020), and Courbage

and Montoliu‐Montes (2020) are concerned with various aspects of long‐term care.

The following three papers, written by Correa, Lu, Parro, and Villena (2020), Tanaka (2020),

and Stenbacka and Tombak (2020), consider different facets of the growing subfield of the

public economics of education.