Abstract
According to the announcement for this conference the general subject area of this paper is ‘Environmental Policy and Public Goods’. The term ‘public good’ is, of course, not a synonym for ‘public welfare’, but rather an antonym for ‘private good’. And what is a ‘good’? In the sometimes peculiar jargon of economics, the word connotes nothing of inherent virtue: basically, a ‘good’ is anything tangible that conveys a ‘service’ to a ‘consumer’. A consumer, by the way, does not physically ‘consume’ anything except air, drinking water and food. For the rest, consumption is essentially a process of exhausting the utility of goods by extracting services from them. The material object, itself, is discarded.
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References
Hudson, E. A., and D. W. Jorgenson (1976), ‘Tax policy and energy conservation’, in Jorgenson, D. W. (ed.), Econometric Studies of US Energy Policy (North-Holland,Amsterdam, 1976 ).
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© 1978 International Economic Association
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Ayres, R.U. (1978). Public Goods, Efficiency and Environmental Statistics. In: Stone, R., Peterson, W. (eds) Econometric Contributions to Public Policy. International Economic Association Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16003-7_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16003-7_17
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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