The protection of private property: the government as a free-rider

Juan Mendoza

Economics of Governance, 2015, vol. 16, issue 2, 179-205

Abstract: This paper develops a positive theory of government that explains the cross country differences in the relative importance of publicly and privately provided protection of property. The theory focuses on the decision of the government to free-ride or not to free-ride on privately provided security. If the government chooses to free-ride on privately provided security then it shirks from the provision of a nonexcludable public good: the deterrence of stealing. The theory implies that governments are more likely to free-ride on privately provided security the less efficient is stealing in capturing private property, the less efficient is the tax system, and the more efficient is stealing in capturing government property. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: Private; Public; Protection; Property; Free-riding; Government; D60; D70; H40; K40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10101-015-0157-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:16:y:2015:i:2:p:179-205

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10101-015-0157-x

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger

More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().