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The main theme of this dissertation is government’s strategic behaviors. We show that different budget structures give governments incentives to behave differently, and that the Leviathan model and the Bureaucratic model are better in modeling government behaviors than the median voter model. We first discuss theoretically the design of an optimal tax system, promoting the Leviathan government to maximize social welfare in order to maximize its own revenue. Then we examine empirically how government behaviors vary with different budget structures. In essay I, we apply the Buchanan-Brennan (B-B) rule to examine the effects of a tax system on the efficiency of agricultural production in the context of Chinese local governments, which receive insufficient control from the central and are free from the pressure from local residents due to asymmetric information and lack of horizontal accountability. We extend the B-B rule to include the incentive issues and the risk sharing, and also their trade-off. Farmers and the agricultural sector assume significant roles in the national economy of China, while the under-provision of public infrastructures and the risks involved negatively affect agricultural production and therefore impede economic growth. Within the principal-agent framework, we illustrate how the problem is inherent in the agriculture tax system in China and propose our solution of special earmarking. In essay II, we test empirically for the government’s strategic behaviors. We argue that the environmental performance is affected by government policy. Therefore it relates inherently to the budget structure and government incentives. With an illustrating model between structure of revenue and expenditure and pollution level, we propose three hypotheses, which state that the lower the ratio of business related tax in total revenue, the higher the ratio of property tax in total revenue, the higher the share of health expenditure in total expenditure, the government will have higher incentive to control pollution and thus the pollution level is lower. Our empirical evidence provides support to our hypotheses, which show that structures of revenue and expenditure do affect the government’s incentives to control pollution. Therefore, changes in the budget structure might be helpful to achieve better environmental performance.

States are increasingly using toll roads as a means of financing transportation capital needs as well as expanding transportation system capacity. Whether toll roads can attract trucks partially determines the performance of the investment. Unfortunately, the low profit margin in the trucking industry and the relatively high tolls truckers pay leads to their reluctance to use toll facilities. Incentives for truck use of a toll road, State Highway 130 (SH 130) near Austin, Texas, were analyzed in this research. As a parallel toll road to the non-tolled, congested facility Interstate 35 (I-35), SH 130 was projected to carry a lot of traffic, including a significant proportion of trucks. In order to make this tolled facility more attractive to trucks, innovative incentives were considered. The potential truck demand for SH 130 and their potential reactions to the incentives were estimated in this research based on survey data. According to survey responses, different groups of the trucking industry had very different characteristics. Due to the variation of the characteristics among different categories of trucks, truckers’ travel behavior and incentive preference were also different by trucking group. Compared with other groups of truckers, smaller companies (owner-operators) were the least likely to use SH 130, while private carriers were the most likely to use SH 130. It was also found many truckers had already made adjustments both to their time and route to avoid traveling in congested conditions. Among all the categories of truckers, for-hire truckers had the least flexibility. The average value of travel time savings of trucks around the Austin area was $44.20 per hour. As the price of travel time savings went up, the percentage of truckers using SH 130 decreased. Price-related incentives were discovered to be most popular with truckers. Among all of the price-related incentives, off-peak discounts and a free trip after a number of paid trips were the most popular incentives.

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The main theme of this dissertation is government’s strategic behaviors. We show that different budget structures give governments incentives to behave differently, and that the Leviathan model and the Bureaucratic model are better in modeling government behaviors than the median voter model. We first discuss theoretically the design of an optimal tax system, promoting the Leviathan government to maximize social welfare in order to maximize its own revenue. Then we examine empirically how government behaviors vary with different budget structures. In essay I, we apply the Buchanan-Brennan (B-B) rule to examine the effects of a tax system on the efficiency of agricultural production in the context of Chinese local governments, which receive insufficient control from the central and are free from the pressure from local residents due to asymmetric information and lack of horizontal accountability. We extend the B-B rule to include the incentive issues and the risk sharing, and also their trade-off. Farmers and the agricultural sector assume significant roles in the national economy of China, while the under-provision of public infrastructures and the risks involved negatively affect agricultural production and therefore impede economic growth. Within the principal-agent framework, we illustrate how the problem is inherent in the agriculture tax system in China and propose our solution of special earmarking. In essay II, we test empirically for the government’s strategic behaviors. We argue that the environmental performance is affected by government policy. Therefore it relates inherently to the budget structure and government incentives. With an illustrating model between structure of revenue and expenditure and pollution level, we propose three hypotheses, which state that the lower the ratio of business related tax in total revenue, the higher the ratio of property tax in total revenue, the higher the share of health expenditure in total expenditure, the government will have higher incentive to control pollution and thus the pollution level is lower. Our empirical evidence provides support to our hypotheses, which show that structures of revenue and expenditure do affect the government’s incentives to control pollution. Therefore, changes in the budget structure might be helpful to achieve better environmental performance.

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Thesis (B.Sc.Hons.) -- University of Adelaide, Department of Psychology, 1974.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 2008. / Thesis supervisor: Ramji Balakrishnan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-191).

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