From public finance to public economics

Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay, Marianne Johnson and Richard Sturn

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2023, vol. 30, issue 5, 934-964

Abstract: The emergence of the expression of ‘public economics’ marked an epistemological rupture in the economic discourse about the state. The local problems and national intellectual traditions that had shaped the centuries-old field of public finance were cast aside in favour of new problems and new methods. From the 1970s onward, public economics became an integrated international field defined by a methodological approach embodied in general equilibrium. Mathematics and optimisation changed the nature of the questions considered. After briefly outlining the historic constitution of the field of public finance and how it was transformed in the middle of the twentieth century, we explain how a new economic theory of public expenditures emerged with one foot in the old public finance and one foot in the new public economics. We then hint at how the integration of risk into economic theory unexpectedly transformed the way economists conceptualised the public sector. Last, we consider how the maximisation of social welfare functions exhibiting a trade-off between equity and efficiency replaced principles of taxation.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09672567.2023.2248323 (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:taf:eujhet:v:30:y:2023:i:5:p:934-964

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REJH20

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2023.2248323

Access Statistics for this article

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought is currently edited by José Luís Cardoso

More articles in The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().