【经岚传递】地方政府公共服务的有效供给

【经岚传递】16L42

地方政府公共服务的有效供给：私有化和公共部门联合体的作用

——[读论文]之“环境经济政策”系列

编译/XB

本期【经岚传递】所介绍的是来自于Rhiannon Jerch, Matthew E. Kahn, and Shanjun Li发表在NBER Working Paper No. 22088（March 2016）上的“Efficient Local Government Service Provision: The Role of Privatization and Public Sector Unions”一文。

文章摘要

全美地方政府每年要花将近1.6兆亿美元来提供系列的公共服务，范围涵盖从警察，消防一直到公共教育和交通等等，然而，我们却很少知道在提供这些服务的过程中，公共部门的生产效率如何。

为了更好地理解不同时期和不同地区的产出效率，文章单独考察了公共汽车服务，公共交通可以作为评估地方政府公共服务生产成本的基准线，在全美20个最大的城市中，公共交通的效率差异很大，每英里成本的差异大到3倍之多。

文章估计了交通私有化后的成本节约效应，并分析了为何在成本较高地区私有化水平背后的政治经济因素。

文章分析发现，在2011年交通部门的完全私有化将节约57亿美元，而如果按照新的成本水平来调整公交价格所带来的经济效率改善效应将至少等同于5亿美金。

Abstract

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.

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