Titre

How Earmarking Government Revenue Affects Efficiency of Road Construction and Maintenance

Type
article
Institution
UNIL/CHUV/Unisanté + institutions partenaires
Périodique
Auteur(s)
Christen, Ramon
Auteure/Auteur
Soguel, Nils C.
Auteure/Auteur
Liens vers les personnes
Liens vers les unités
ISSN
1091-1421
Statut éditorial
Publié
Date de publication
2021-01
Volume
49
Numéro
1
Première page
136
Dernière page/numéro d’article
163
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Langue
anglais
Résumé
It is common practice to assign revenue to accomplish specific governmental tasks in general, and to provide transport infrastructure in particular. However, neither the literature in public administration nor in public choice has reached a consensus about the effects that earmarking has on efficiency. Building on earlier public choice models, we argue that this mechanism prevents budget debates from occurring and reduces the incentives for ministers to monitor the colleagues whose budgets are financed by earmarked revenues. These latter tend to overuse public resources, thus increasing inefficiency. We used a stochastic frontier model fed with data from Swiss cantonal ministries of transport from 2000 to 2016 to test this hypothesis. Our results revealed a negative effect of earmarking on efficiency. For every 1,000 additional Swiss francs per capita financed out of an earmarked fund, the input requirement increases by 5.4 percent on average.
Sujets

Economics and Econome...

Finance

Public Administration...

PID Serval
serval:BIB_25EE29A4986F
DOI
Permalien
Open Access
Oui
Date de création
2021-01-19T13:39:45.648Z
Date de création dans IRIS
2025-05-20T19:40:36Z
Fichier(s)
En cours de chargement...
Vignette d'image
Nom

Christen, R., and Soguel, N. (2021). How Earmarking Government Revenue Affects Efficiency of Road Construction and Maintenance.pdf

Version du manuscrit

postprint

Taille

765.17 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

PID Serval

serval:BIB_25EE29A4986F.P001

URN

urn:nbn:ch:serval-BIB_25EE29A4986F0

Somme de contrôle

(MD5):f468387b7c4c18c7d675360717db0bcf