An approach to the public household with focus on degrees of access for publicly funded goods and services

Abstract

The reasons and justifications for funding/providing goods and services publicly are central in political and public discourse, effecting all citizens daily lives. The problem is that most of the academic literature deals with such reasons either from an economic standpoint or from a normative standpoint -- the majority of the time strictly separated. This thesis is an attempt to generate an approach to the reasons for public funding and provision, which can accommodate an array of values, including those prominent in economics (e.g., efficiency) and those prominent in political philosophy (e.g., re-/pre-distributive justice, solidarity). This thesis will disentangle the two classic conditions, non-excludability and non-rivalry, of the prominent economic frameworks for public expenditure, the public goods theory, and connotate a different meaning to those. The perspective this thesis will suggest, perceives non-rivalry as a condition which the states intend to imitate when proving/funding goods and services publicly. Moreover, non-excludability is not considered a necessary or sufficient condition for a public good, but it is acknowledged that public goods come in degrees of accessibility. Perceiving degrees of access as mean to manage fund effectively (so that outcome and intended purpose align) implies that analysing those can help to unveil the purposes which motivated the decision to fund/provide referring goods publicly in the first place.