Bureaucracy and Public Economics

This text brings together the 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 contributions to this field have been brought together in this volume, including his 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 economic of bureaucracy.