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A corrupção tem sido objeto de estudo em diversas pesquisas, mas apenas recentemente tem sido investigada experimentalmente. Uma maneira de estudar tal fenómeno é expor os participantes a um Jogo dos Bens Públicos (JBP) no qual eles precisam contribuir para produzir um bem público específico, e então precisam tomar decisões sobre como tal bem seria distribuído entre os demais participantes. Um participante que fizer distribuições desiguais beneficiando a si estaría se comportando de maneira análoga ao que é descrito pelo crime de peculato. O objetivo do presente estudo foi investigar como os participantes distribuiram recursos públicos no JBP. Seis participantes foram expostos ao procedimento. Cinco deles fizeram distribuições desiguais, isto é, alocaram a maior parte dos recursos para si mesmo. A partir destes resultados, sugerimos mudanças nas contingencias que controlam a ocorrência deste tipo de comportamento.

The impact of performance pay in institutions with multiple goals depends on complementarities in the disutility cost of effort and how different tasks interact to achieve each goal. Workers of a mission-oriented nonprofit were randomly assigned to one of two bonus schemes, each incentivizing one of its two main operational goals: the performance of its microcredit program and the strengthening of community institutions of the poor. This study finds that the credit bonus improved credit-related outcomes but it undermined the social outcome. In contrast, the social bonus advanced the social mission as well as the microcredit program, but only for employees working alone, undermining the performance of employees working in teams. These results cannot be explained by a standard multitask principal-agent model featuring only complementarities in the disutility cost of effort. Instead, they suggest that production complementarities are also relevant.

Most criminal defendants cannot afford to hire an attorney. To provide constitutionally mandated legal services, states commonly use either private court-appointed attorneys or a public defender organization. This paper investigates the relative efficacy of these two modes of indigent defense by comparing outcomes of codefendants assigned to different types of attorneys within the same case. Using data from San Francisco, I show that in multiple defendant cases, public defender assignment is plausibly as good as random. I find that public defenders reduce the probability of any prison sentence by 22% and the length of prison sentences by 10%.

This paper examines the commodification process initiated through a series of state-led programs and questions the sustainable public goods provision in rural China. We challenge the unilateral understanding of spontaneous commodification by the profit-seeking community, and argue that the influence exerted by the Chinese government cannot be ignored. It is found that a preliminary partnership among the state, private investors and villagers was formed to create a hot-spring village called Tangjiajia in suburban Nanjing. The reconstruction was the result of a state-led renovation of the built environment, but it also catalyzed villager entrepreneurship and boosted community consensus. Regarding the public goods provision, stakeholders in the village now enjoy high-quality facilities and services provided by the government for free but have failed to foster reciprocal cooperation to replenish the subtractability of the rural commons. We claim that state intervention is temporal but not a cure-all. A pricing mechanism for the sustainable delivery of public goods is urgently needed in the community. The state-led commodification has undermined the previous low-level equilibrium of rural governance. From the stance of rural sustainability, only self-organization of the rural community can solve the dilemma.

When and how do governments deliver public goods and services in response to citizen preferences? We review the current literature on government responsiveness, with a focus on public goods and service delivery in developing countries. We identify three types of actors that are commonly present in these accounts: politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens. Much of this literature examines interactions between dyads of these actors. The study of electoral accountability and constituency services emphasizes relationships between citizens (or voters) and politicians. Studies of bureaucratic incentives and political oversight of bureaucrats emphasize interactions between politicians and bureaucrats. Finally, studies of bureaucratic embeddedness and citizen oversight of bureaucrats elaborate the interactions between bureaucrats and citizens. We argue that an emerging literature that considers interactions between all three types of actors provides rich theoretical and empirical terrain for developing our understanding of responsiveness and accountability in low- and middle-income countries and beyond.

Problem definition: Congestion pricing offers an appealing solution to urban parking problems—charging varying rates across time and space as a function of congestion may shift demand and improve allocation of limited resources. It aims to increase the accessibility of highly desired public goods and to reduce traffic caused by drivers who search for available parking spaces. At the same time, complex policies make it harder for consumers to make search-based decisions. We investigate the effect of congestion pricing on consumer and social welfare. Academic/practical relevance: This paper contributes to the theory and practice of the management of scarce resources in the public sector, where welfare is of particular interest. Methodologically, we contribute to the literature on structural estimation of dynamic spatial search models. Methodology: Using data from the City of San Francisco, both before and after the implementation of a congestion-pricing parking program, SFpark, we estimate the welfare implications of the policy. We use a dynamic spatial search model to structurally estimate consumers’ search costs, distance disutilities, price sensitivities, and trip valuations. Results: We find that congestion pricing increases consumer and social welfare by more than 4% and reduces search traffic by more than 10% in congested regions compared with fixed pricing. However, congestion pricing may hurt welfare in uncongested regions, in which the focus should be on increasing utilization. Moreover, an unnecessarily complex congestion-pricing scheme makes it difficult for consumers to make search-based decisions. We find that a simpler pricing policy may yield higher welfare than a complex one. Lastly, compared with a policy that imposes limits on parking durations, congestion pricing increases social welfare by allocating the scarce resource to consumers who value it most. Managerial implications: The insights from SFpark offer important implications for local governments that consider alternatives for managing parking and congestion and for public-sector managers who evaluate the tradeoffs between approaches to manage public resources.

This paper reviews the shifting fate of legumes in UK agriculture. Legumes were once a common part of crop rotations, providing food and feed, while enhancing soil fertility and enabling pest control. During the 20th century, UK arable management became predicated on minimally diverse crop rotations, dependent on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Legumes were locked out of food and farming. Existing research has identified the drivers of this lock-in. Whilst this intensive model increased crop yields, there are growing concerns around its greenhouse gas emissions and impacts on soil health and biodiversity. In response, there is a resurgence of interest in legumes as a solution to these problems, as part of a wider shift towards agroecological management. This analysis draws on interviews with different actors in the UK agricultural sector to present a Multi-Level Perspective analysis of the drivers and characteristics of this transition - what we term agroecological break-out. It describes how macro-level economic changes (a growing market for plant-based proteins) and political transitions (a focus on public goods subsidisation) are combining with shifting agricultural attitudes (such as concerns around soil health, and the prioritisation of multi-annual profitability over annual yields) to increase the attractiveness of crop diversification and legume cropping. These changes open space for micro-level innovations by private, public, and civil society actors to disrupt the meso-level status quo of minimally diverse crop rotations. The conclusion maps the different forms and trajectories of this break-out and reflects on their implications for the future of food and farming in the UK.

Problem setting. The current stage of social development poses on a global scale of countries tasks and requirements concerning public administration systems’ construction taking into account basic principles of democracy, onward movement, balance, sustainable development. A new space of social interaction is being formed, which is characterized by fundamentally different peculiarities, while changing the traditional social roles of modern society and its individuals. Our state also needs an open and transparent governance that can face the new contemporary challenges and requirements, where digital technologies can substantially stimulate development of the transparent information society as one of the essential factors of Ukrainian democracy progress, increase of productivity, economic growth, job creation as well as appearance of new forms of solidarity, partnership and cooperation, significant increase of life quality of the whole society and its individuals.Recent research and publications analysis. In the modern scientific literature on the subject of our study there is a number of publications that to some extent respond to the demand of research raised. In consideration of the appearance of new research areas as well as attempts to characterize current trends in social development in terms of new technologies’ usage in the field of public administration the researches of recent years are worthy of notice. Thus, the publications of R. Vlasenko, O. Kolomytseva and I. Shevchuk, O. Orlov, O. Orlov and A. Serenok, O. Pizhuk, L. Samoilenko, V. Chekina and S. Kniaziev, I. Shkyrta and V. Lazar are devoted to certain issues related to our study, on the main results of which we relied in its conducting.Highlighting previously unsettled parts of the general problem. The Ukrainian Government has determined a new main direction for further development of Ukrainian society; it made a decision on general digitalization, digital transformation, introduction of the latest achievements in the field of information and telecommunications technologies in all spheres of life, which begin to play a top-ranked role and transform into a key factor affecting almost all social processes – from daily to global. In view of the aforesaid the study of state support for organization and implementation of relevant arrangements is of great relevance, because countries that do not focus enough attention on this issue, risk losing their positions not only in the IT sphere, but also in others – economic, financial, humanitarian, etc.Paper main body. Over the past few years emerged a global trend, the impact of which on public administration is currently not very noticeable, but in a few years it can become a determining factor in operations with data in political and social spheres. The matter concerns shifting the emphasis towards Big Data analysis technologies’ usage, which became widespread mainly in commercial and private spheres.Nowadays the usage of new technologies to achieve the public good is a global trend that gives impressive results, because in forming of Big Data content are involved all participants of public-civil interaction actualizing in that way potential areas of its usage, among which, in particular: tracking the dynamics of public opinions’ change on the effectiveness of public authorities’ activities, forecasting, elaboration, appropriate decision-making on further socio-economic development of certain territories and assessing their effectiveness and efficiency, analysis of changes in audience mood and response to published information about public authorities’ activities and implemented administrative decisions, identification of basic needs, requests and pursuits of inhabitants of the certain territory, identification of the main problem issues requiring urgent solutions, etc.Already now the work is under way at the state level on the wider usage of modern e-governance tools, including automation of data bulk processing and information-analytical support of administrative decisions, optimization and automation of administrative processes, implementation of electronic interaction forms. The main task to ensure the development of e-governance in the basic fields of Ukraine is implementation of information and telecommunication systems of decision-making support and automation of administrative processes (including usage of prospective geographic information technologies, Internet of Things, Big Data processing technologies and Blockchain).Therefore now when public authorities have an opportunity not only to collect but also to analyze and manage Big Data, they have received a powerful tool for its effective usage to construct a safer society, to improve and optimize its administrative functions, to forecast and reduce the government spending, etc.Conclusions of the research and prospects for further studies. Thus, the benefits of Big Data usage in public authorities are obvious. They allow to reveal hidden patterns that are invisible to human perception. And this provides good opportunities for optimization of all spheres of human life: public and municipal government in general, medicine, security, finance, transport, education and more. Therefore, further research on the analysis of implementation and usage of specific e-governance tools in the basic fields of Ukraine concerning decision-making support and automation of administrative processes seem to be very promising.

Brexit repatriates agriculture policy and subsidies after over 40 years of determination by the European Commission. The paper starts by describing the baseline at Brexit, noting the relatively small economic contribution, the problems of competitiveness given the UK’s geology and geography, and the poor environmental outcomes. The scope for improvement is correspondingly large, and in particular through the impacts of the new agricultural policy based upon public money for public goods and for England, the Environmental Land Management Schemes. Larger and more long-term impacts will come through new trade agreements, through new technologies, including digitalization, robotics, and genetics, and through carbon farming and offsets. Finally, the paper sets out a framework for a future assessment of the impact of Brexit.

We state and analyze a non-cooperative approach to the provision of public goods where agents decide simultaneously not only their private contribution but also their level of utilization which may differ among consumers (contributors and non-contributors). We show that the distribution of intensities of use matters and allows us to deepen the analysis of altruistic behaviors, neutrality results, congestions issues, and further externalities captured within our framework.

Despite the efforts to reduce poverty in rural municipalities income inequality persists in Mexico. This study presents an analysis on rural household income distribution in the country, since it is argued that conditional federal transfers fail on improving income distribution among rural households. The hypothesis stated that, because of local public goods are also part of individual budget constraints, it is rational to think that an expansion in the provision of local public goods will increase total income and, if such public goods are financed with conditional grants that target low-income groups, it is expected that income inequality may decrease. Thus, the objective was to classify rural municipalities in order to observe which among them have benefited from federal grants and those that did not, finding the reasons why assuming grants are accepted as an instrument contributing to reduce poverty and income inequality in recent years. Each group was analysed as a cluster to observe the effect of federal transfers on rural household income distribution. Main results showed that municipalities with rural low income-inequality and better economic development indicators improve income distribution when obtaining unconditional grants. This means that, in such cases, those transfers designed to reduce poverty also reduce rural income inequality. But that was not the case for the high income-inequality groups, where conditional grants did not have any effect on inequality and, in some cases, inequality increased. For the rural high income-inequality group, unconditional grants showed not to have a positive effect on reducing inequality. The clustering and regression analyses revealed large heterogeneity in the rural areas in terms of income and economic development.

For decades, corporate undermining of scientific consensus has eroded the scientific process worldwide. Guardrails for protecting science-informed processes, from peer review to regulatory decision making, have suffered sustained attacks, damaging public trust in the scientific enterprise and its aim to serve the public good. Government efforts to address corporate attacks have been inadequate. Researchers have cataloged corporate malfeasance that harms people’s health across diverse industries. Well-known cases, like the tobacco industry’s efforts to downplay the dangers of smoking, are representative of transnational industries, rather than unique. This contribution schematizes industry tactics to distort, delay, or distract the public from instituting measures that improve health—tactics that comprise the “disinformation playbook.” Using a United States policy lens, we outline steps the scientific community should take to shield science from corporate interference, through individual actions (by scientists, peer reviewers, and editors) and collective initiatives (by research institutions, grant organizations, professional associations, and regulatory agencies).

The premier data on leader survival focus on the violent, dramatic means by which leaders ‘exit’ office. This information, vital for many research questions, constitutes a valuable public good for the community. Yet, it provides an incomplete picture of the political rise and fall of world leaders. The burgeoning study of leaders using survival analysis requires a fine-grained understanding of not just when, but why and how leaders lose power. We cannot, for example, conclude that a leader’s exit implies a successful application of international pressure if her removal stems from pre-set constitutional laws and the immediate successor has long been considered the heir apparent. The Regular Turnover Details dataset remedies this problem. Two principal variables report information about the manner of each leader’s exit and the relationship between outgoing and incoming leaders, allowing analysts to arbitrate between exits that suggest political failure and those that don’t, identify non-political leaders (such as interim and technocratic executives), and determine whether leaders constitute heirs to power or challengers thereto.

Scholars and practitioners of public administration often discuss the core values of the field. Referred to as the pillars of public administration, economy, efficiency, effectiveness and equity ha...

PurposeRecently, multidimensional aspects of poverty has been increasingly focused on which includes education, economy and health, while access to modern energy such as stable electricity is also one of the possible solution; thus, this article aims to divulge the relation between access to electricity and progression in socioeconomic status in urban and rural areas of Nigeria in an attempt to propose a sustainable framework for access to electricity.Design/methodology/approachDemographic and health survey data are collected using four categories of model of questionnaires. A standard questionnaire was designed to gather information on features of the household's dwelling element and attributes of visitors and usual residents between the 2018 period. Biomarker questionnaire was used to gather biomarker data on men, women and children. Logistic model estimation technique was employed to estimate the socioeconomic factors affecting access to electricity in Nigeria.FindingsThese studies discovered that there are diverse set of factors affecting access to electricity in Nigeria especially in the rural areas. However, respondent residing in rural areas are still largely deprived access to electricity; most importantly, households with no access to electricity are more likely to use self-generating sets as revealed. Additionally, empirical findings indicated that the higher the level of your education and wealth, the higher the likelihood of having access to electricity in Nigeria. These factors included political will to connect the rural areas to the national grid, development of other infrastructures in those deprived areas and others.Practical implicationsThe problem confronting access to electricity in Nigeria has three components. The first is the significance of those deprived access to electricity in the rural areas and the physical resources needed to connect them to the national grid. The second is the political willingness of the government to have equitable distribution of public goods evenly between rural and urban areas especially on electricity access which will go a long way in reducing poverty in Nigeria. The third is lack of robust national development plans and strategy to tackle the problems facing electricity access in Nigeria.Social implicationsAs the rate of socioeconomic status/development increases, access to electricity is anticipated to rise up in Nigeria.Originality/valueThe findings can be used by the policy makers to address problems facing access to electricity in Nigeria.

We examine the effects of real-time pricing on welfare and consumer surplus in electricity markets. We model consumers on real-time pricing who purchase electricity on the wholesale market. A second group of consumers contracts with retailers and pays time-invariant retail prices. Electricity generating firms compete in supply functions. Increasing the number of consumers on real-time pricing increases welfare and consumer surplus of both types of consumers. Yet, risk averse consumers on traditional time-invariant retail prices are always better off. Collectively, our results point to a public good nature of demand response in power markets when consumers are risk averse.

This paper investigates the how government outsourcing affects efficiency and expenditures by considering how outsourcing decisions are determined along two dimensions: (i) cost differences between private firms and government suppliers of public goods and (ii) dynamics arising from cost complementarities and capacity constraints. I formulate and estimate a dynamic model of government outsourcing using project-level data from the dredging industry. Model estimates indicate substantial cost savings due to outsourcing but also that government presence in the market yields cost reduction. A counterfactual policy featuring direct competition between government and private sector firms finds a total expenditure reduction of 15.7 percent. (JEL D44, H41, H57, L84)

A public apology is a fairly common content found on the YouTube platform to restore the reputation and regain people's trust. At the same time, Youtube can also be used as a commodity-based economic platform that allows organizations, individuals, and Google (the owner of Youtube) to earn revenue either through advertising or direct promotion. These two things reflect the dual benefits of two opposites: genuine demand in the public interest and economic exploitation for the benefit of certain parties. This is well explored by the political economy theory of media which sees the digital platform as a convergence between the moral economy of commodities, the moral economy of gifts, and the moral economy of public goods. This article aims to further explore the three elements of the political economy of the media in the context of apologies on Youtube in five cases that occurred in Indonesia. The five apology cases were analyzed using parameters reflecting the moral economy of commodities, gifts, and public goods. The results of the analysis provide a typology of apology and a model that reflects the interrelation between the three moral economies involved in every apology.

A wide range of public goods, such as open source software, possess two often-ignored features: (i) excludable and potentially rivalrous contribution benefits (e.g. status seeking) and (ii) nonexcludable and nonrival consumption costs (e.g. adoption costs). I develop a model of the voluntary provision of public goods that incorporates these features. I find that these additional features mitigate the well-known incentive problems, but introduce new ones. Costly consumption lessens the free-rider problem, leading to more efficient provision. Private benefits similarly reduce the free-rider problem, but can lead to over-provision via a negative congestion externality on the supply side. Status-seeking induces an increase in contributions to the benefit of each contributor but imposes a cost on all other consumers and contributors. Efforts to maximize welfare by a community leader or social planner often involve transferring surpluses from consumers to producers.

This study analysed how local governments react to intergovernmental competition for private capital in the public goods market. Using microlevel data for public-private partnership (PPP) projects ...

The non-excludable and non-rivalrous characteristics of public goods distinguish them from private goods. The existence of these two characteristics leads to the “free rider problem” and the variation problem, making the market supply less than the actual demand, thus causing market failure. The government should therefore intervene against this impact. At the beginning of 2020, the global outbreak of the novel COVID-19 brought significant harm to various countries, races, and groups of people. In the second half of 2020, several companies developed vaccines, which are able to fundamentally block the transmission of the virus. However, as vaccines have been reducing the severity of the epidemic in certain regions, the situation somewhat reflects non-excludability and non-rivalry, in which before officially being listed in vaccination programs, the society may have the thought of “vaccination would reduce the risk of transmission; thus, I can enjoy the reduced risk of everyone being vaccinated without paying for it.” For this reason, most countries have been purchasing vaccines for the public through government appropriations to solve the free-rider problem. It can be said that in the face of market failure caused by public goods, the government should carry out timely intervention measures, including taxation and government appropriation, to avoid negative impacts from the characteristics of public goods.

В представленной статье на основе материалов глубинного интервью и анкетного опроса дана характеристика субъектов и практик политико-экономического взаимодействия в Кузбассе как в регионе ресурсного типа. В роли таких субъектов выступают представители региональной администрации и ресурсных компаний. Сравнительные преимущества представленного исследования заключаются именно во взгляде изнутри на данный региональный кейс, состоящий в том, что исследователи сами были погружены в реалии экономики и общества Кемеровской области. Это означает, что они занимались решением специфической именно для социологии задачи теоретизации обыденного. Решение этой задачи предполагает использование исследовательской стратегии обоснованной теории, предполагающей выбор моделей и инструментов, соответствующих особенностям объекта исследования. Выбранная методология исследования позволила описать сложившиеся в Кузбассе практики квазипубличного взаимодействия, которые характеризуются следующими чертами. Представители региональной власти и ресурсных компаний позиционируют себя как субъекты, действующие в интересах всего населения региона. При этом они монополизируют функции формулирования и реализации общественных целей развития, заявляя о том, что только они обладают необходимой для этого информацией и возможностями. В рамках такого подхода население практически исключается из числа активных субъектов политико-экономического и социального взаимодействия. В свою очередь представители властных структур и ресурсных компаний на неформальном уровне совместно реализуют как экономические, так и политико-административные функции. Власть привлекает предпринимателей к реализации своих политико-административных функций, включая финансирование производства общественных благ, различного рода социальных и инфраструктурных проектов и т. д. Предприниматели соглашаются на это, понимая, что без прямой поддержки власти ведение сколько-нибудь серьезного бизнеса невозможно. При этом все участники политико-экономического взаимодействия: политические руководители, профессиональные государственные служащие, собственники и менеджеры ресурсных компаний – ведут себя не в соответствии со своими формальными социальными ролями, а как персоны, включенные в закрытую вертикальную социальную сеть.

This paper contributes to the debate on the varieties of national manifestations of the public good(s) in higher education. Drawing on a set of 33 semi-structured interviews (with politicians, univ...

In a social dilemma, group members have equal access to collective resources, but each must decide between acting in self-interested or collectively interested ways when considering their contribution to the group. Our research focused on how the perceived fairness of contributions and outcomes affects these decisions. We report on an experiment that manipulated two factors related to fairness: dilemma-framing that emphasized either individual or collective gains, and whether the partner’s relative contribution was high, low, or equal to the subject’s. Also, subjects’ social value orientations—individualist vs. prosocial—were balanced across conditions. Subjects made two rounds of contribution decisions and received feedback on their outcomes after each. As hypothesized for first-round contributions, prosocials contributed more to public goods and framing had no discernable effect. In the second round, neither social value orientation nor framing influenced participants’ fairness evaluations when partners made a low initial contribution to the group, but dilemma-framing affected participants’ fairness evaluations when the partner made a high contribution to the group. Importantly, results generally supported key hypotheses for participants’ attempts to rectify injustices via subsequent contributions and bonus sharing. Partner’s contributions, social value orientation, and dilemma-framing all affected redistributive behaviors.

Access and benefit sharing (ABS) is a transactional mechanism designed to allow countries to trade access to their sovereign genetic resources for monetary and non-monetary benefits, with the ultimate goal of channelling those benefits into sustainable development and environmental conservation. Arguments about how pathogens are not the sort of genetic resources the world ought to conserve eventually gave way to a recognition that pathogens are indeed sovereign genetic resources under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol, and that the ABS transaction may be an effective way to deliver scarce vaccines to developing nations as benefits received in exchange for shared pathogen samples. This article argues that categorising vaccines as benefits given in exchange for access to pathogen samples creates opposing incentives for providers and users of virus samples and undermines the human right to health because it makes that right a commodity to be bought. The provision of pathogen samples to the global research commons and the fair and equitable distribution of medicines should be two parallel public goods to be pursued as goals in and of themselves. We conclude that the linking of these goals through the ABS transaction should be reassessed.

The article deals with the current debate about COVID-19 Vaccines as global public/common goods. After a brief introduction on the global epidemiological and economic implication of the pandemic, the problem of the correct characterization of either vaccine or immunization/herd immunity as global public/common good, according to the necessary characteristics outlined by the pertinent economic theories, is addressed. The conclusion is that the term “global public good”/global common goods” has been extensively used in the last two years by policy makers, political leaders, academics, economists, international organizations, NGOs and others health groups, in a sort of “loose way”. Substantially, in order to underscore that equitable access to health products, including vaccines, health and biomedical technologies, medical services, medical devises, whose availability, accessibility, acceptability, affordability to the world is fundamental to tackling the pandemic. The current legal proprietary regime applied to vaccines, extensively covered by IPRs, has transformed an intrinsically non-excludable common/public good (the vaccines, due to their nature and characteristics) in something excludable and rival in consumption. Consequently, the article argues that what is needed is a swift in their legal governance. The current legal discipline of vaccines and health technologies must be changed to bring it into line with the non-excludable nature of these goods. The richest countries in the world, in pursuit of their “vaccine nationalisms”, have already collectively preordered 8.8 billion doses of vaccine, far in excess of need, thus obliging billions of people in the Global South to wait years to be vaccinated. In this respect, the article investigates the EU vaccines strategy and analyzes the Advanced Purchase Agreements signed by the European Commission with the major vaccine producers, enlightening the untenable secrecy and opacity with which the European Union’s executive has handled COVID-19 vaccine supply contracts, and how it has simply paid no more than lip-service to the concept of global common/public good by attributing a broad “private governance” to the pharmaceutical companies. Then, the various arguments, for and against, the Waiver Proposal to several sections of the WTO TRIPS agreement, introduced by India and South Africa on the TRIPS Council on October 2020, have been briefly summarized, accounting the current luck of needed consensus among the various members of the WTO. The article however describes an important number of new global and collaborative efforts already put in place by a myriad public and private actors to allow efficient development and production of vaccines in order to enhance a global access to vaccines. The article concludes by stressing the major developments in the U.S. patent’s landscape and in the Biden Administration’s attitude towards the current global health crisis, that leave hope for “extraordinary measures” to be agreed by the international community in near future. The auspice is that the time has finally arrived for the international community to develop reliable and long term solutions to tackle future global pandemic, preferably by the negotiation of a new WHO global health treaty, to secure universal fair access to essential technologies and vaccines and protecting them as global public/common goods.

A major share of the energy demand in the United States and around the world is met by energy sources derived from conventional fossil fuels. Combustion of fossil fuels causes serious emission of greenhouse gases and particle pollution, that translates into health hazards. Consumption of renewable energy can help reduce the carbon footprint and cut down the health risk. In this study we present results from a lab experiment in which subjects participated in a context-rich, incentivized game with elements of an impure public good, risk, and intertemporal discounting. The subjects played the role of a household head to decide on how much to spend on energy saving technologies. The spending reduced the future energy cost and emission, as well as emission related health risk and associated medical costs for everyone in the group. The discounting was characterized by allowing to save with interest earnings across multiple rounds. Each subject played three sections (baseline, a treatment, and a repeated baseline) and each section was comprised of 30 rounds. The treatment had a threshold public good feature, where the emission tax level was dependent on the overall energy-saving investments made by the group. Subjects exhibited significant learning and wealth effect in adopting more energy saving technologies over time. Furthermore, subjected were given the option to purchase health insurance to mitigate risk. The result shows that the adoption rate is higher when the emission tax is framed as a reward rather than a punishment and average energy savings are crowded out with the option to purchase health insurance. However, on average subjects who decide to purchase health insurance also save more energy than those who refuse to purchase it.

Self-driving and recreational vehicle (RV) camps are a new form of industry module with the integration of transportation and tourism in China, thus the scientific and reasonable site selection plays an important role in the success of camps’ construction and operation. In terms of relying resources and development factors, camps can be divided into five categories: scenic-spot-based, transportation-based, environment-based, project-based and leisure and vacation-based. According to whether it is of excludability and competitiveness, the camps in China mainly embody the attribute of private products. Based on the combination of subjective evaluation and objective calculation, the evaluation model of spatial site selection is constructed and the weight of each index is calculated by using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and entropy coefficient method. The results show that traffic condition factor is the priority to the selection of campsite, and whether it is on the popular main self-driving route and the grade of trunk roads are the dominant indices. The second factor taken into consideration is the social factors, in which government policy supports and land cost play a key role. The third factor is the market, in which the urban economic level, partnership with the government and tourist resource conditions are of great importance. The fourth factor of the campsite selection includes natural elements, in which the quality of ecological environment and water source conditions are mostly considered. In the future, it is suggested that a camp pattern of “public goods” plus “private goods” should be built and the construction of camps in underdeveloped areas should be highly developed so as to form camp spatial network from individual points to a series of campsite and finally the campsite group in China will be set up.

Inefficient functioning of excise duty policy causes illegal turnover of cigarettes and tax optimization. This reduces the fiscal and regulatory effects of excise duty, causes negative socioeconomic consequences (low-quality illegal excisable products create high risks to public health) and prevents the goals of internalization of externalities. The purpose of the article is to analyze the impact of rising excise duty rates on the volume of illicit turnover of cigarettes in Ukraine and to formulate proposals for improving state policy in the field of excise duty taxation of tobacco products. The methodological basis of the study was the use of a set of general and special research methods: analysis and synthesis – to detail the subject of study and study its components in integrity and unity; economic analysis and statistics – to establish the peculiarities of the transformation of the domestic market of tobacco products; trend and structural analysis - to study the dynamics and structure of indicators of the market of tobacco products, econometric modeling – to determine the impact of excise tax on the volume of illicit cigarettes; extrapolations – in determining the possibility of implementation of existing world experience in the domestic practice of control over the circulation of tobacco products; graphical and tabular methods of visualization – to visualize the processes occurring in the market of tobacco products. During the period of 2011–2020, the level of excise duty burden on tobacco products gradually increased with rapid and repeated increases during the reporting year in some periods, and in general cut almost 10 times. As a result, taking into consideration the low income of the population, the affordability of the most sold brand of cigarettes among neighboring countries is now one of the lowest. This led to negative processes in the tobacco market in the form of a significant increase in the share of illicit trafficking in cigarettes, which in January-February 2021 reached 12.8 %. Using econometric modeling methods, it was found that an increase in the price of cigarettes by 1 % leads to an increase in their illicit turnover by 1.22 %. In other words, the increase in excise duty rates and, as a consequence, cigarette prices in Ukraine has a significant impact on the volume of illicit turnover in tobacco products. The main forms of evasion, avoidance and tax optimization in the field of production and circulation of tobacco products are identified, which include: counterfeit; smuggling; «cheap whites»; «bootlegging»; promotion of excisable goods in the supply chain without payment and / or partial payment of taxes; sale of tobacco and tobacco products through e-commerce using postal and courier services; replacement when marking the direct object of taxation; dumping. Due to the significant spread of illicit turnover in cigarettes, it is necessary to modernize the tools for controlling the production and circulation of tobacco products. The existence of illicit cigarette trafficking reduces the effectiveness of tax regulation of the tobacco products market, while depriving the state of tax revenues that are crucial for financing public goods. In addition, criminal proceeds of illegal activities are generally used in corrupt schemes of other illegal activities, thereby undermining public safety, good governance and the rule of law. Illegal trade negatively affects the legal market for excisable goods, hinders the competitiveness of law-abiding businesses and undermines the reputation of regulatory authorities. The proposed organizational and legal measures to combat illicit turnover of cigarettes will help to avoid such negative phenomena.

As of 2021, more than 30 countries have released national artificial intelligence (AI) policy strategies. These documents articulate plans and expectations regarding how AI will impact policy sectors, including education, and typically discuss the social and ethical implications of AI. This article engages in thematic analysis of 24 such national AI policy strategies, reviewing the role of education in global AI policy discourse. It finds that the use of AI in education (AIED) is largely absent from policy conversations, while the instrumental value of education in supporting an AI-ready workforce and training more AI experts is overwhelmingly prioritized. Further, the ethical implications of AIED receive scant attention despite the prominence of AI ethics discussion generally in these documents. This suggests that AIED and its broader policy and ethical implications—good or bad—have failed to reach mainstream awareness and the agendas of key decision-makers, a concern given that effective policy and careful consideration of ethics are inextricably linked, as this article argues. In light of these findings, the article applies a framework of five AI ethics principles to consider ways in which policymakers can better incorporate AIED’s implications. Finally, the article offers recommendations for AIED scholars on strategies for engagement with the policymaking process, and for performing ethics and policy-oriented AIED research to that end, in order to shape policy deliberations on behalf of the public good.

This paper attempted to estimate optimal size of public sector that prompts positive output growth in Nigeria based on Monte Carlo simulation of estimated parameters of an error correction model having controlled for regime effect. Our motivation derives from economic theory that absence of government could be injurious to output growth culminating in unavailability of contracts and public goods. Using different policy scenarios of public sector share in GDP, the study validates and supports the tenets of Rahn Curve that economy shrinks when government grows enormous as we found 40% public sector spending as proportion of GDP as optimal public sector size that stimulates positive growth rate of about 0.095% having controlled for regime effect. By implication, our original contribution in this study is amplified on our empirics that public sector role in Nigerian economy is less than or equal to 40%. Consequently, any size of public sector beyond forty percent is economically destructive as it capable of stimulating negative spill overs on the economy due to growing taxes and public debt repayment. Hence, public sector spending should be significantly less than forty percent or at most forty percent for purpose of economic growth. This indeed translates to enforcing responsible fiscal policy centred on forty percent public sector size.

Deforestation and forest degradation remain huge global environmental challenges. Over the last decades, various forest governance initiatives and institutions have evolved in global response to interlinked topics such as climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, indigenous rights, and trade impacts – accompanied by various levels of academic attention. Using a Delphi methodology that draws on both policy and academic insights, we assess the currently perceived state of play in global forest governance and identify possible future directions. Results indicate that state actors are seen to be key in providing supportive regulatory frameworks, yet interviewees do not believe these will be established at the global scale. Rather, respondents point to issue-specific, regional and inter-regional coalitions of the willing, involving the private sector, to innovate global forest governance. Linking forest issues with high politics may hold promise, as demonstrated by initiatives regarding illegal logging and timber trade. Confident rule-setting in support of the public good as well as responsible investments are seen as further avenues. New forest governance “hypes”, if used strategically, can provide leverage points and resources to ensure sustainability effects on the ground. At the same time, informal markets are often crucial for governance outcomes and need consideration. As such, clarifying tenure in sovereignty-sensitive ways is important, as are innovative ways for inclusive “glocal” decision-making. Lastly, new technologies, big data and citizens’ capacities are identified as potent innovation opportunities, for making global dependencies between consumption, production and deforestation visible and holding players accountable across the value chains.

This special issue is dedicated to the theme of public interest technology (PIT) [1] . PIT acknowledges that technological potential can be harnessed to satisfy the needs of civil society. In other words, technology can be seen as a public good that can benefit all, through an open democratic system of governance, with open data initiatives, open technologies, and open systems/ecosystems designed for the collective good, as defined by respective communities that will be utilizing them. Just like in the established field of public interest law (PIL) [2] , [3] and public interest journalism (PIJ) [4] , we can consider potential fields around the idea of PIT [5] , [6] , such as public interest co-design (PITco), even public interest engagement (PITengage) or public interest consulting (PIC). For decades, public interest engineers (PIEs) have volunteered their time to collaborate in meaningful participative engagements. These engineers have self-organized some impressive collectives including Engineers Without Borders, ASCE Disaster Assistance Volunteer Program, Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, Architecture for Humanity, Bridges to Prosperity, Bridging the Gap Africa, Engineers for a Sustainable World, GISCorps, Habitat for Humanity, National Engineering Projects in Community Service, just to name a few. These collectives and initiatives call attention to the primary role of a PIT practitioner. That is, the importance of PIT practitioners serving as transdisciplinary intermediaries between the community and the STEM disciplines and technical teams, emphasizing the importance of justice, equity, and inclusion in the design and deployment of new technologies [7] that allow for positive social transformation and empowerment [8] .

Cooperation is particularly important in the management of common resources where the user rights of individuals are collective. We used a one-shot public goods experiment to construct a measure of...

Governments coordinate people’s various interests through budget allocations for the provision of the public goods and services. In order for governments to maintain their budgetary power, it is im...

Today, U.S.-based corporations control much of the internet worldwide, but this was not always the case. During the administration of U.S. President Clinton (1993-2001), the U.S. Department of Comm...

The free riding incentive has been a major obstacle to establishing markets and payment incentives for environmental goods. The use of monetary incentives to induce private provision of public goods has gained increasing support to help market ecosystem services. Using a series of lab experiments, we explore new ways to raise money from individuals to support private provision of multi-unit threshold public goods. In our proposed mechanisms, individuals receive an assurance contract that offers qualified contributors an assurance payment as compensation in the event that total contributions fail to achieve the threshold provision cost. Contributors qualify by contracting to support provision with a minimum contribution. Evidence from lab experiments shows that the provision probability, group demand revelation, and social welfare significantly increase when the assurance contract is present. Coordination is improved by the assurance payment especially for agents with values above the assurance level, leading to significantly higher aggregate contributions. A medium level of assurance payment used on units with medium and high value-cost ratios is observed to induce the largest improvement on social surplus. Our approach contributes to the private provision of environmental and other types of public goods.

Este estudo tem como objetivo investigar a instalação de uma fábrica de refrigerantes no município de Duque de Caxias no estado do Rio de Janeiro, a indústria em questão se utiliza do aproveitamento de água de lençóis freáticos para produção de bebidas, se utilizando de um bem público e transformando-o em lucro privado. As informações obtidas na pesquisa, foram tratadas como mote para propor uma atividade de Educação Ambiental Crítica para alunos do Ensino médio. Para tanto, foram realizadas inserções ao local de pesquisa, a metodologia deste artigo foi baseada em uma pesquisa participante onde os alunos foram convidados a avaliar os problemas gerados pela indústria, com a intenção de fazer com que construíssem conosco uma Educação Ambiental Crítica atrelada a aspectos coletivos e não unicamente individuais.

The rise of climate-active municipalities – cities and towns voluntarily creating carbon reduction policy substantially more stringent than their host countries or the international system as a whole – presents a puzzle. Countries, with greater resources and the capacity to create binding agreements to overcome public goods problems, appear to view carbon reduction as an unappealing burden. So why are municipalities, with fewer resources and no way to guarantee a coordinated global effort, so eager to take on the potential disadvantages of stringent carbon reduction? Based on examination of municipal-level carbon reduction activity in Sweden and Portugal, I argue that in fact local-level climate activity represents not a burden but a tool. Municipal climate policy forms the basis for ‘paradiplomacy’ that captures goods for cities, creates international linkages for municipalities, and allows direct participation in setting the terms of global carbon commons policy. The evidence suggests that the nature of the climate commons – incompletely structured from a legal and political perspective, and open to access and intervention by actors at multiple levels – provides unique opportunities for actors to act as makers rather than takers of global governance structure and diplomatic effort in a critical area of emerging international policymaking.

Le present article etudie le workshop anime, au sein de l’universite d’Indiana, par Elinor et Vincent Ostrom, a partir des annees 1970, comme un atelier, une fabrique collective et interdisciplinaire de savoirs. Il en retrace l’histoire, ainsi que les principales productions, en termes d’idees, d’artefacts et d’infrastructures de recherche. Ces productions relevent de trois procedes alternatifs de fabrication : la production en equipe, la coproduction et la production « liee ». La production en equipe, soit l’existence de collaborations scientifiques sur des projets communs, est largement mise en evidence dans la litterature. Nous montrons, cependant, que le positionnement extra-departemental du workshop, de meme que son ethos de l’artisanat, l’ont grandement facilitee. La coproduction de savoirs a, quant a elle, ete realisee dans le cadre de partenariats actifs avec des collectivites autonomes ou des agences locales de fourniture de biens collectifs. Au-dela du simple audit des gouvernances existantes, ces collaborations avaient pour vocation de faconner avec les partenaires une gouvernance appropriee, respectueuse de l’esprit de coproduction de services publics defendu par les chercheurs du workshop Ostrom. Enfin, une production liee et cumulative de savoirs, sous forme de produits fatals, a conduit, au travers de projets de recherche individuels sur la gouvernance, a l’emergence progressive d’un langage conceptuel et d’un cadre d’analyse des institutions : l’IAD (Institutional Analysis and Development).

The purpose of this study is to analyze different interpretations of public good(s) in the context of higher education, the contributions that higher education makes to the public good, and how these contributions are measured in Japan. The analysis draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with policy makers, presidents of national professional associations, institutional leaders, deans and professors from contrasting disciplines, and other administrators from two national universities in Japan. Firstly, all interviewees believed that Japan’s higher education could be considered to be a public good. However, they did not consider it a pure public good. Secondly, the study not only reveals a wide variety of interviewees’ interpretations of the public good, the public good of higher education, the contributions that higher education makes to the public good, and the measurement of these contributions, but also suggests to what extent interviewees’ understanding deviates from the literature. Finally, while the structure of Japan’s higher education system, including the quantitative dominance of private universities, tuition fee system, and existing oversight of the public good, may suggest that there are fewer contributions to public good in Japan’s higher education than in European continental countries, the study reveals that Japan’s higher education, including private universities, contributes the public goods, and its contributions to the public good or public goods are highly valued.

This paper examines the access that neighborhoods have to jobs via public transit, if it varies by race/ethnicity, and what difference it makes in terms of socioeconomic outcomes. Decades of research has argued that important sites of employment are often not located in or are inaccessible to racial/ethnic minority neighborhoods. Here, we examine this proposition and take into account how public transit may play into this process. On the one hand, public transit as a public good may have the power to overcome the liabilities of place. If we can build transportation systems that give all neighborhoods comparable access to jobs, part of the spatial mismatch problem may be corrected. On the other hand, if public transit is built in such a way that certain racial/ethnic groups are benefiting, but not others, access alone is not enough to achieve parity. Using the 2013–2017 American Community Survey and the 2017 Access Across America Transit study, we examine how neighborhood racial/ethnic composition is related to job accessibility and socioeconomic outcomes at the block group level for 49 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. We find that Black and Latino neighborhoods have access to fewer jobs via public transit, and that they also have lower median household income and a higher unemployment rate, net of access to jobs. Access to more jobs via mass transit is related to higher incomes in White block group clusters, but has no impact on household incomes in Black and Latino clusters. This suggests that public transit as implemented serves to aggravate existing inequalities and is not currently acting as a policy tool to ameliorate inequality.

Internet services are often free of charge but ask for customers’ personal data in exchange for usage. We experimentally study whether the provision of information-based public goods is susceptible to restraint when contributions not only make contributors better off but also enable a non-contributing “big player” to acquire substantial profits. We show that the presence of the big player crowds out the willingness to provide neutral tokens, but no such effect is observed for the provision of private information. Hence, collecting anonymized personal data instead of monetary fees can be more profitable to service providers and create greater benefits for customers.

This paper studies the effect of the economic impact payment (EIP) on individual contributions to COVID-19 mitigation efforts in the USA, where the mitigation efforts are measured by the reduction of daily human mobility. I empirically estimate the effect of the EIP in April 2020 and use cellphone GPS data of 45 million smartphone devices as a proxy for human mobility across 216,069 Census Block Groups. The results show that when receiving the EIP, households significantly increased “Median Home Dwell Time” by an average of 3–5% (about 26–45 min). The paper highlights this unintended effect of the EIP, namely, that in addition to providing economic assistance, the EIP also helped increase individual contributions to mitigation efforts that slowed COVID-19 virus transmission in early 2020. Supplementary Information The online version supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00181-021-02117-0.

Economists would assume that farmers with a net benefit will adopt programs incentivizing the delivery of public goods. Farmers who reject participation in such programs for principled reasons challenge this wisdom. This paper borrows from Will Wright's description of the North American cowboy to illustrate the motives and beliefs of this group. A survey in Switzerland about possible incentivizing programs in the realm of animal health is used to identify and characterize Swiss ‘cowboys.’ 22 % of the sample rejects any participation in incentivizing schemes. Their income and education levels are relatively low, and their ages tend to be high. They emphasize individualism and autonomy, rejecting interventions of the state in their ways of farming. The more ‘cowboys’ manage farms, the less successful incentivizing programs become.