Public Sector Economics

This course uses the basic tools of microeconomics to analyse the role of government and the rationale for and design of taxation and expenditure policy. The topics to be covered include a review of basic microeconomics, welfare economics, cost-benefit analysis, public goods, externalities, public choice, public expenditure programs (including education, health, pensions and welfare payments), and taxation (including efficiency and equity issues, tax incidence, Australian tax policy, and fiscal federalism). By the end of the course, students should have an appreciation of the principal forms of market failure that provide a justification for government intervention, be familiar with the main policy instruments used to mitigate market failures and the principles that guide their optimal use, but also understand the limitations of government intervention - for instance, understand how the presence of information problems both explains the forms that policy intervention take and imposes limits on what can be achieved by it. The course also covers topics on public choice and provides an alternative, more critical, view of government. The public choice perspective places more emphasis on modelling the political process and argues that this, like the market mechanism, has readily identifiable sources of failure.