It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Government failure and market failure: on the inefficiency of environmental and energy policy.
David Anthoff , David Anthoff. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Robert Hahn. In any case, most firms do not lobby policymakers even when it may appear to be in their interest to do so—and, importantly, most members of Congress do not want to hear from lobbyists. Considering the growth in campaign spending and widespread condemnation of a legal system that does little to curtail contributions or even force public accountability, the evidence that campaign contributions have a decisive impact on the efficiency of government is surprisingly lacking.
Why, then, do firms give so much in campaign contributions? Many large firms do not even have corporate PACs, and many of those that do make only nominal contributions. Interest-group spending is primarily defensive, as my former Brookings colleague the late William Frenzel, a member of Congress for 20 years, told me many times. As new policy proposals surface, more firms increasingly spend small sums to maintain the status quo.
As noted, the private sector often prefers this situation too. For example, very few congressional staff have formal training in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mat. Not surprisingly, Congress has taken ideological positions toward Big Tech, is unable to attract and retain technically savvy employees to help them craft effective technology policies, and has no incentive to take a long-run view and promote constructive ways in which technology can help shape society.
Status-quo bias inhibits policymakers from learning about the effects of their policies and why and how they could be reformed. It also enables inefficiencies in one area to persist and compound inefficiencies in other areas. Even if federal performance could be easily measured, federal worker pay is generally tied to longevity, not performance. Federal workers receive rising salaries even if they perform poorly. Disciplining federal workers is difficult and they are rarely fired, which can result in agencies carrying heavy loads of poor performers.
The government needs complex regulations and extensive paperwork to carry out routine functions such as procurement. One reason is that in the public sector there are no clear goals such as maximizing profits. Another reason is the need to prevent public corruption. The plethora of rules adds to federal inefficiency and sluggishness.
Because of the frequent turnover of political appointees in federal agencies, many agencies experience continual changes in their missions driven by transitory and political factors. There were 1. Despite this increased ratio of protection, crime did not decrease—it increased. Between and , the U. So will a look at the U. Postal Service and, unfortunately, at almost every other U.
Reasons for Inefficiency. The proposition they seem to accept is that bureaucracy is not necessarily inefficient and uneconomical in itself, but can be corrected. In another study, Richard S. Not only is productivity in these groups lagging, but little is being done about it. It is a natural tendency for a public employee to want to handle fewer cases—pupils, tax returns, welfare families, crimes—in the belief that he could do a better job if he had a smaller workload, and most certainly have an easier life.
For the supervisor there is a definite gain in stature, position—and even grade—by having a larger number of subordinates. This and the ideological commitments to the program goals and methods of their professional fraternities provide a powerful and well-nigh irresistible incentive for empire building. The Direct Beneficiaries. Government programs are so structured that the incentive is never to solve whatever problem is being dealt with—but to see to it that it is exacerbated, and that more money becomes necessary to fight it.
In the so-called "War On Poverty," for example, programs were not designed to give money to the poor, whatever the merits of that would have been, but, instead, to give money to people who were to provide "services" to the poor. The result has been that the only poverty such legislation corrected was that of its own employees.
0コメント