William Arthur Niskanen Jr. was een Amerikaanse econoom, bekend om zijn belangrijke bijdragen aan het economische programma van president Reagan en de ontwikkeling van de public choice theory. Hij was ook vele jaren voorzitter van het libertarische Cato Institute. Zijn werk richtte zich voornamelijk op de analyse van economische besluitvorming in de publieke sector en de gevolgen van overheidsinterventies. Niskanens invloed op het economisch beleid en het academische discours is onmiskenbaar.
This retrospective by acclaimed economist William A. Niskanen examines a wide variety of key public policies and politically controversial issues, including those pertaining to trade, unemployment, election law, and the economics of war and peace. Niskanen applies sharply focused economic perspectives to each topic, illustrating how the use of economic incentives significantly aids the creation of solid, successful polices.
Bureaucracy and Public Economics brings together in one volume the classic book and related articles which put forward the first formal economic theory of the behaviour of bureaucracies. William Niskanen Jr. has consistently argued that bureaucrats have personal objectives - that differ from those of both their political supervisors and the general public - which they further by use of their monopoly power. He develops his argument to contend that government budgets have become too large and should be curtailed. All of Professor Niskanen's major contributions to this field have been brought together in this one volume including his pioneering article on 'The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy', the full text of the book ' Bureaucracy and Representative Government ' and his recent reassessment of the larger body of scholarship on the economics of bureaucracy.Scholars, students and teachers of public economics will welcome this volume which, by making some of the key contributions in the field more widely accessible, will provoke discussion, debate and further research.