Public Enterprise Economics

Book excerpt: Advanced Textbooks in Economics, Volume 23: Public Enterprise Economics: Theory and Application focuses on economics, mathematical economics, and econometrics, including microeconomics, marginal-cost pricing, taxes, and income effects. The manuscript takes a look at the essential parts of public sector pricing models, normative optimum theory, and normative piecemeal theory. Discussions focus on welfare improvements with non-tight constraints, welfare -improving increases of public inefficiency, conditions for optimal prices and quantities, compensating for income effects, and conditions for optimal quality. The book then ponders on marginal-cost pricing, Ramsey pricing, rate of return regulation, and pricing with distributional aims. Topics include comparing distributional and allocative pricing, prices versus taxes, optimum Ramsey policy, influence of Ramsey prices on allocation, distribution, and stabilization, and consequences for allocation, distribution, and stabilization. The publication examines bus and underground services in London, economic theory and empirical analysis, and different approaches towards optimal quality, including empirical studies on bus and underground demand, organizational and political history, and microeconomics of the representative consumer. The book is a valuable source of data for researchers interested in public enterprise economics.