The Transition from Pigou’s Ideas on Road Pricing to their Application

Kenneth Button

No wkrb5, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: A century ago Arthur Pigou published The Economics of Welfare. Within this volume are a few lines relating to the pricing of traffic congestion. Over the years, these lines have attracted the attention and thoughts of some of the leading economists of their day. These have included, Knight, Clapham, and Robertson in the 1920s, Kahn and Viner in the 1930s, Ellis and Fellner in the 1940s, and Buchanan, Vickrey, Solow, Friedman, Walters, Demsetz, Newbery, and Allais in the post-World War II period. Here I look at the academic arguments from the 1920s concerning how roads should be priced, and by whom. I then move to consider the continuation of the intellectual debates after World War II and their implications for policy design and implementation. Finally, I briefly look at the extent to which some of the existing road congestion pricing systems meet the requirements of the economic theory.

Date: 2020-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-reg and nep-tre
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/603d7a9f035cf702bec87563/

Related works:
Journal Article: THE TRANSITION FROM PIGOU’S IDEAS ON ROAD PRICING TO THEIR APPLICATION (2020)
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:osf:osfxxx:wkrb5

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/wkrb5

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().