Public Action for Public Goods / Abhijit Banerjee, Lakshmi Iyer, Rohini Somanathan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Banerjee, Abhijit.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Iyer, Lakshmi.

Somanathan, Rohini.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w12911.

NBER working paper series no. w12911

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2007.

Summary:

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of these intuitive theoretical arguments rely on special additional assumptions that are often not made clear. We then review the empirical work based on the predictions of these models of collective action. While the available evidence is generally consistent with these theories, there is a dearth of quality evidence. Moreover, a large part of the variation in access to public goods seems to have nothing to do with the "bottom-up" forces highlighted in these models and instead reflect more "top-down" interventions. We conclude with a discussion of some of the historical evidence on top-down interventions.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2007.