What’s the Government Ever Done for Me? Consumer benefits of infrastructure services

Carmit Schwartz, W. Erwin Diewert and Kevin J. Fox

Discussion Papers from Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence

Abstract: This paper provides methodologies for evaluating consumer benefits of infrastructure services. We define benefit measures for consumers and, using general principles from the index number literature, derive alternative first and second order approximations to these measures under the assumption of fixed prices for market goods and services. We describe how the benefit measures and their associated approximations can be used in quantifying the economic benefits when prices are allowed to change endogenously as the provision of infrastructure services changes. Under quite nonrestrictive assumptions, a measure of welfare change is also derived.

Keywords: Consumer benefits; infrastructure services; first order approximation; second order approximation; flexible functional forms; index number theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 D61 H41 H43 H54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10-30
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eoe:escoed:escoe-dp-2025-15

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