How Much Liberty Should We Have? Citizens versus Experts on Regulating Externalities and Internalities

Fredrik Carlsson, Olof Johansson-Stenman (olof.johansson@economics.gu.se) and Mitesh Kataria (mitesh.kataria@economics.gu.se)
Additional contact information
Olof Johansson-Stenman: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: P.O. Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden, http://www.economics.gu.se
Mitesh Kataria: Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University, Postal: P.O. Box 640, SE 40530 GÖTEBORG, Sweden, http://www.economics.gu.se

No 841, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Based on a tailor-made survey, we find that experts – academics and civil servants – are much more willing than citizens in Sweden to accept liberty-reducing regulations. Moreover, both citizens and experts are more supportive of regulating negative internalities (in terms of health) than negative externalities (in terms of climate change). While less liberty-reducing policy instruments receive more support, around 20 percent of citizens and experts support very intrusive measures such as non-transferable individual quotas for air travel and unhealthy foods. Both experts and citizens prefer encouraging to discouraging information provision, while experts are more positive than citizens to tax instruments.

Keywords: externalities; internalities; paternalism; experts; citizens (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D04 D62 D91 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2024-01-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-hpe, nep-ltv and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/79569 Full text (text/html)

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:hhs:gunwpe:0841

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
jessica.oscarsson@economics.gu.se

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson (jessica.oscarsson@economics.gu.se).