Microeconomics,, 16th Canadian Edition

Military service is not the only example of a social responsibility. Citizens cannot buy their way out of jury duty or legally s ...

A General Principle We have discussed how the free market may fail to achieve social goals that members of society deem to be de ...

16.5 Government Intervention Since markets sometimes do fail, and since even efficient markets produce some undesirable outcomes ...

decisions are made. By narrowing the range of things that must be determined by informal judgment, cost-benefit analysis can sti ...

Public Provision National defence, the criminal justice system, public schools, universities, the highway system, and national ...

failure that we have discussed in this chapter; it applies at some level to virtually all spheres of modern economic life. ...

The Costs of Government Intervention Consider the following argument: The market system produces some particular outcome that is ...

who are employed by the Competition Bureau, and the educators who retrain displaced workers. Similarly, when government inspecto ...

Government safety and emissions standards for cars raise the costs of both producing and operating cars. Environmental policies ...

Indirect costs of government intervention are substantial but difficult to measure and are usually dispersed across a large numb ...

Private firms and special-interest groups often lobby governments for policies in their own interest but at the expense of the p ...

Government Failure Even in the cases in which the benefits and costs of government intervention can be easily identified and mea ...

This model of government behaviour never fitted reality, and economists were gradually forced to think more deeply about the mot ...

maximize their salaries and their influence. Voters seek to maximize their own utility. To this end, voters look to the governme ...

taxpayers vote for a party that advocates lower taxes on the rich and lower transfers to the poor. On the other hand, the charac ...

consider changing the agricultural policies only when the cost of agricultural support becomes so large that ordinary taxpayers ...

governments do not have competitors and are not constrained by the “bottom line.” ...

How Much Should Government Intervene? Do governments intervene too little, or too much, in response to market failure? This ques ...

of intrusive government that flowed through most of the twentieth century? Or have we gone too far by giving some things to the ...

Summary ...