Diagrammatic Exposition of a Theory of Public Expenditure

Abstract

In the November 1954 issue of the Review of Economics and Statistics my paper on ‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’ presented a mathematical exposition of a public expenditure theory that goes back to Italian, Austrian, and Scandinavian writers of the last 75 years. After providing that theory with its needed logically-complete optimal conditions, I went on to demonstrate the fatal inability of any decentralized market or voting mechanism to attain or compute this optimum. The present note presents in terms of two-dimensional diagrams an essentially equivalent formulation of the theory’s optimum conditions and briefly discusses some criticisms.

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