Archaeologists, anthropologists, and evolutionary biologists study the origins of our relationship with dogs and how it has evolved over time. Sociologists and legal scholars study the roles of dogs in the modern family. Veterinarian researchers address the relationship in the context of professional practice, yet economists have produced scant scholarship on the relationship between humans and dogs. Dog Economics applies economic concepts to relationships between people and dogs to inform our understanding of their domestication. It interprets their contemporary role as both property and family members and explores factors that affect the demand for dogs as well as market failures of the American puppy market. Offering economic perspectives on our varied relationships with dogs, this book assesses mortality risks and addresses end-of-life issues that commonly arise. It develops a framework for classifying canine occupations, considers the impact of pet insurance on euthanasia, and assesses the social value of guide dogs.

Many policymakers are unwilling, or think that it is infeasible, to perform comprehensive cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of programmes in social policy arenas. What principles actually underlie CBA? An understanding is necessary to assess whether other evaluation methods are close enough to CBA to provide useful information on social efficiency. This paper explains five underlying CBA principles and the challenges in applying them to social policy arenas. It assesses a number of 'less-than comprehensive' versions of CBA and analyses their 'closeness' to comprehensive CBA and, thus, their value as assessments of changes in social efficiency. We show some types of analysis are not close enough and explain why. We provide a taxonomy of these methods in terms of their comprehensiveness with respect to both social costs and benefits. We also argue that an analysis should provide a clear normative basis for its geographic scope in order to claim it assesses economic efficiency.

There is very limited theory and policy guidance that specifically relates to multijurisdictional and multimodal (M&;M) infrastructure corridors: those that traverse national boundaries and encompass multiple modes of co-located infrastructure modes. This paper develops a framework for understanding the social welfare costs and benefits—and the barriers to implementing—these corridors. The framework posits the need for both a dedicated assembler and a national (or supranational) sponsor. An assembler provides the platform to match up initial property rights holders, infrastructure mode providers and end users. The sponsor financially and politically backstops an assembler. We decompose the economic necessity for, and advantages of, an assembler and also those that result from some degree of multimodality. We also consider the economic and political barriers to M&;M corridor implementation. To illustrate these, we review the evidence from the very small number of proposed or realised M&;M corridors and closely related projects. Although reliable evidence is scarce, it is consistent with the framework’s implications regarding the need for both an assembler and a sponsor.

Governments use public–private partnerships (PPPs) as their agents to finance, design, build, maintain and operate their public infrastructure. Despite wide use, many PPPs have produced poor outcomes, including large transaction costs, renegotiations and bankruptcies. Society delegates the authority to build and operate public infrastructure to governments, which must then choose the means of provision. The alternatives are either government-financed design-build contracting, followed by government operation and maintenance—traditional procurement (TP)—or a PPP. We examine this choice using principal–agent and political economy theories. We evaluate the performance of PPPs versus TP against the normative goal of social welfare (economic efficiency). As well, in a review of the empirical literature through 2022, we find no convincing evidence that PPPs provide superior social welfare, nor evidence that many projects been evaluated on this basis. Governments’ continued preference for PPPs in many cases is best explained by political goals and political economy theory. A review of recent empirical evidence supports the view that political economy variables contribute to PPP adoption.

PurposeThis paper addresses the social value of commercial enterprises that are jointly owned by a government and private sector investors and where the shares are listed on a stock exchange: thus, “listed public–private enterprises” (LPPEs). The theoretical part of the paper addresses how differences in ownership patterns influence the behavior and performance of LPPEs.Design/methodology/approachWe develop a conceptual taxonomy, drawing on the empirical evidence on the behavior and performance of public–private hybrid enterprises and on the application of agency theory to that evidence. The taxonomy discussion predicts how different ownership patterns affect enterprise productive efficiency and the ability of governments to achieve social goals through LPPEs. We review the empirical literature on government enterprise ownership and on the concentration of private share ownership to deduce how these matter for owner and managerial behavior and productive efficiency. We review the literature that considers the informational content that listing of an enterprise's shares on a stock exchange can provide to enterprise owners, managers and other domestic audiences with a policy interest. We employ a social welfare perspective to derive policy implications as to when the LPPE governance structure is most appropriate.FindingsWe show how the monitoring and performance weaknesses of state ownership are offset by some private ownership, particularly when combined with listing on a stock exchange. We demonstrate the effects of different governance structures on enterprise productive efficiency. We find that the LPPE structure is particularly appropriate as an alternative to nationalization or to full privatization and regulation of natural monopoly public utilities, and as an alternative to full private ownership and taxation of non-renewable natural resource extractive enterprises.Originality/valueThis paper explicitly addresses the question of why and how the combination of government ownership, private investor ownership and listing on an exchange is socially valuable in providing information on productive efficiency to governments.

Whose costs and benefits should count in cost-benefit analysis (CBA)? This is an important practical question requiring answers for analysts because most government agencies offer only permissive or vague guidance. Drawing primarily on foundational CBA principles, we present a conceptual framework for specifying standing to answer three important boundary questions: Where? Who? What? First, a standing framework requires a definition of jurisdictional boundaries (the "where" question), whether national, subnational, or supranational. Second, a framework should be clear about which persons within the jurisdiction have standing (the "who" question). For example, should undocumented residents have standing? Third, the framework requires clarity on the standing of certain individual preferences (the "what" question), such as for harmfully addictive private or public goods that express "moral sentiments," or when choices do not maximize the value of consumption. We seek to provide guidance for CBA practice within this framework.

This article presents new estimates of social discount rates (SDRs) for seventeen Latin American countries for use in public project evaluation. We derive the SDRs based on the social rate of time preference method and provide the required parameter values. These rates range from 2.14 percent for Paraguay to 5.83 percent for Chile. The unweighted average recommended rate is 3.77 percent, which is close to the rates mandated by most European countries. We also review current governments’ SDR practices worldwide, including Latin America, and find that the proposed country-specific SDRs are significantly lower and less dispersed across countries than the rates most Latin American countries currently recommend. Using four archetypal projects profiles, we show the potential impact on the net present values of varying important parameters, including growth rates.

Hybrid organisations, which must accommodate the interests of multiple principals if they are to survive, take many forms. Intra-sector hybrids, either with only public sector principals, such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, or with only private sector principals, such as social enterprises that seek to promote both social purpose and profitability, typically face tensions between goals that complicate the tasks of managers, sometimes resulting in the dominance of the goal of one, or one kind of, principal to resolve the tension. The potential for goal tension is more acute in cross-sector hybrid organisations that have both public and private principals (public?private hybrids) especially when the private principal seeks to maximise profit and profit maximisation is not the primary public purpose of the hybrid. Based on the fractionalised property rights (FPR) framework we describe below, we argue that the extent to which the potential for dysfunctional conflict materialises depends on the specific characteristics of the property rights that define the claims and duties of the organisation’s principals and managers (Vining and Weimer, 2016). Further, we present a diagnostic FPR framework based on what we consider to be the six most important dimensions of organisational property rights. The unpacking of the FPR framework helps to explain why certain kinds of public?private hybrids are more or less prone to dysfunction, and consequently the framework may assist organisational designers in reducing the chances of dysfunction within a category of hybrids. If public?private hybrids are particularly vulnerable to goal tensions, why have they become so common? There are several reasons why public?private hybrids are especially attractive to legislative and bureaucratic organisational designers. From a normative perspective, public?private hybrids offer the pleasant prospect of marrying public purposes to private sector efficiency and strategic flexibility (Eckel and Vining, 1985; Pargendler et al., 2013). They also offer political benefits. By employing the private sector, legislative and executive actors can obscure responsibility for performance outcomes, while implying that they are dragging reluctant bureaucrats towards more ‘business-like’ behaviour. This message is attractive to right-of-centre politicians who are critical of the Leviathan, but who still wish to provide services to voters.

The Canadian Northern Corridor (CNC) is a proposed multimodal, multijurisdictional corridor. It is a highly complex, long-term infrastructure project. Such projects often fail to get implemented, but the limited evidence suggests that they can get built when a single entity (a national government or a supranational organization) assembles the rights of way and provides corridor access to various infrastructure providers. This entity, which we refer to as the “assembler,” has to (1) assemble the required rights of way from all those currently holding the property rights; and (2) decide on the allocation of, at least, usage property rights to different kinds of infrastructure providers (and ultimately users of that infrastructure). For the CNC, the assembler could be the federal government or a consortium that also includes subnational levels of government. Because First Nations and other Indigenous groups in Canada have constitutional (or at least quasi-constitutional) status, they might also have a role in a consortium.

Some issues in the application of benefit–cost analysis (BCA) remain contentious. Although a strong conceptual case can be made for taking account of the marginal excess tax burden (METB) in conducting BCAs, it is usually excluded. Although a strong conceptual case can be made that BCA should not include distributional values, some analysts continue to advocate doing so. We discuss the cases for inclusion of the METB and the exclusion of distributional weights from what we refer to as “core” BCA, which we argue should be preserved as a protocol for assessing allocative efficiency. These issues are topical because a recent article in this journal recommends ignoring the METB on the grounds that desirable distributional effects offset its cost. We challenge the logic of this article and explain why it may encourage inefficient policies.

Governments in many industrialized nations have made concerted efforts to reduce their immediate expenditures and to reduce the cost of major infrastructure projects. Public–private partnerships (P3s) are one emerging method that might do so. Despite the increased use of P3s, there is little independent research on the effectiveness of P3s as a public policy instrument. This article considers the major rationales for P3s, including cost savings and keeping project financing off government budgets. It then presents a transaction cost model that suggests that P3s can often be prone to conflict, high contracting costs, opportunism and failure. Evidence from six major infrastructure projects and a summary analysis of US prisons is then presented. These cases confirm that contracting costs have been high, as predicted by the model. Specifically, high contracting costs reflect the presence of complexity/uncertainty, asset specificity, the potential for ex post bilateral opportunism and a lack of contract management skills by governments. Given these circumstances, the private sector can behave opportunistically at the expense of the public sector as there has sometimes been a political imperative to prevent projects from terminating. Public partners have also behaved opportunistically after projects are in place. Unless public sector managers recognize that they must design contracts that both compensate private sector partners for risk and then ensure that they actually bear it, P3s have little chance of being efficient or effective service delivery mechanisms.