The fact that user charges are a growing source of revenue for municipal governments reflects their increasing political popularity. The association between user charges and efficiency also make them an economically sound method of finance. The combination of these two factors creates the possibility for user charges to save U.S. cities billions of dollars a year. / User charges embody the idea of benefit-based finance. When user charges are set properly and are related to the costs of service, they provide incentives for efficiency. The bureaucracy theory of William Niskanen suggests that governments will be inefficient, either producing too much of a good, or producing it at too high a cost. User charges should counteract these effects by providing a link between consumption and payment (creating incentives to economize on quantity) and by reducing fiscal illusion (creating an incentive to economize on cost). / Municipal sewer service is chosen as the focus for the study because the service is relatively uniform across cities, and because many cities conform to EPA user charge guidelines. These EPA regulations are compared with the theoretically ideal user charge, and it is found that cities are using important economic cost criteria when setting user charges for sewer service. / A hypothesis to be tested is developed: increases in the extent to which cities rely on user charges to finance services should be associated with reductions in expenditures on those services. A model of municipal expenditure is developed and tested using 1990 Census data, and the results strongly support the hypothesis. Simultaneity and aggregation bias in the model are tested for and are rejected. The hypothesis is also confirmed with tests on parks and recreation and parking services. Possibilities for further development of user charge research are discussed. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-07, Section: A, page: 2658. / Major Professor: Paul Downing. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1993.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_76963 |
| Contributors | Bierhanzl, Edward Joseph, Jr., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 188 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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