What should be the role of government in society? How should it design its programs? How should tax systems be designed to promote both efficiency and fairness? Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and new co-author Jay Rosengard use their first-hand policy-advising experience to address these key issues of public-sector economics in this modern and accessible Fourth Edition.

The second edition of Public Finance and Public Policy retains the first edition's themes of investigation of responsibilities and limitations of government. The present edition has been rewritten and restructured. Public choice and political economy concepts and political and bureaucratic principal-agent problems are introduced at the beginning for application to later topics. Fairness, envy, hyperbolic discounting, and other concepts of behavioral economics are integrated throughout. The consequences of asymmetric information and the tradeoff between efficiency and ex-post equality are recurring themes. Key themes investigated are markets and governments, institutions and governance, public goods, public finance for public goods, market corrections (externalities and paternalist public policies), voting, social justice, entitlements and equality of opportunity, choice of taxation, and the need for government. The purpose of the book is to provide an accessible introduction to the use of public finance and public policy to improve on market outcomes.

This book was prepared mainly for specialists on the assumption that it would provide the background to an important neglected field of discussion in public finance. Since it was first published in 1958, the theory of public goods and its implications for public policy have become incorporated in the main body of the economic analysis of public finance in the literature. A glance at the footnotes of some of the standard textbooks on public finance indicates that this assembly of articles has not been in vain. Probably the most influential part of this collection has been the papers concerned with the theory of public expenditure, which contains two closely related elements. The first is as a part of welfare economics: under what conditions can Pareto optimality be achieved in an economic system in which some goods supplied are indivisible? The other strand of thought is concerned with the positive theory of the public sector: how can economic analysis be used in order to explain how the size and composition of the budget is actually determined?