Restructuring State And Local Services

Under pressure from both the Federal government and private citizens, local and state governments are restructuring their services, including the areas of education, highway, and transportation. While the federal government wants to reassign responsibilities to local governments, voters want greater efficiency and lower taxes via privatization. This edited collection considers these pressures, the responses from state and local governments, and specific experiments in privatizing local services.

The book's opening chapter presents an overview of the changing landscape, while the following chapters consider possibilities in both education and highway services. In education, interdistrict school choice and state-local structures are considered. Highway services are seen in federal-state and state-private relationships. Reporting on a variety of experiments, each chapter illustrates a type of service or arrangement for restructuring governmental services.

Examines issues and experiments in restructuring education, transportation, and highway services.

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Presents varied views of how the production of state and local government services is being restructured. Topics include interdistrict school choice in a metropolitan setting, emerging opportunities for public-private partnerships in highway development, the political economy of privatization, privatizing state and local government services, the US domestic transportation example, and privatizing wine and spirits distribution in Pennsylvania. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

ARNOLD H. RAPHAELSON is Professor of Economics at Temple University.