Public finance concentrates on the economic decisions made by government. There are naturally two distinct sides of government’s activities. One is related to collecting revenues (taxation); the other is related to spending the collected money. These policies affect the allocation of (scarce) resources in an economy, which is the focus of economics as a science. We will use both positive and normative approaches to analysis of public policies. Recall that normative economics tries to answer the question “what should be happening”, while positive economics tries to answer the question of “what is happening”. The former approach is mostly related to the developing advice for government, and quite expectedly, it generates the largest difference in opinions and depends heavily on personal attitudes toward the role of government of each analyst. The tools of positive economics can be used to analyse the actual policies as well as to predict the effects of new planned laws and regulations. The government intervention is often associated (but clearly not limited to) with the so-called market failures (when market forces left alone do not produce desired (efficient) outcome). A few examples include public goods like national defence and (negative) externalities coming from smoking. To conduct policies government taxes individuals and businesses. All of the issues mentioned above became increasingly important in recent years.

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【全文下载】Public finance公共财政课件（owa State University ;Dan Otto;）（一）