The Use of Public Expenditures for Redistributive Purposes.

Governments use expenditures extensively as redistributive devices. Examples include the public provision of health, education, welfare, and public pensions. The authors' purpose is to investigate the normative rationale for such policies. In particular, they study the role of government expenditures as purely redistributive devices given that the government also uses an optimal nonlinear income tax. The authors assume that public provision to an individual cannot be related to individual characteristics or income, so it is uniform across individuals. They derive a set of sufficient conditions for the use of public expenditures and apply it to the examples of education and pensions. Copyright 1995 by Royal Economic Society.