|
In these early years of the 21st century, many countries face growing demands on services funded centrally. Surging healthcare costs, increasing national security programs, increasing education costs and aging populations threaten to outstrip the capacity or willingness of communities to meet the full cost of such services through taxation. Add slowing global economies to the mix and the challenges of funding the ever-growing needs of citizens are no longer merely academic.
The trends that we highlight revolve around a cycle of not enough money for all the programs democratic and open societies fund. In good economic times, funding the “public good” is painless, as there is money for all such goods. When those funds decline, for whatever reasons, public scrutiny sharpens toward expenditures on such nonrevenue producing sectors as police, fire, sewers, roads, libraries, schools and so on. Communities, large and small, are then pushed to declare where scarce funds will be expended. Police or sewers? Roads or libraries?
In countries in transition these issues are more clear-cut. The question is not one of dismantling existing abundant social services and goods. If there were a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Community Needs, a stable electricity system would be funded before schools are equipped with swimming pools. But for wealthier countries unused to making such choices, one overarching trend is that scarce funds for supporting all the public goods will make for an acrimonious process of resource allocation.
Major trends
The public and public goods1
|
Download a PDF of this section (1.52M)
Order a print version of this publication
E-mail this to a colleague
Tell us what you think
|
