Social Welfare and Collective Goods Coercion in Public Economics

This paper develops and expanded framework for social planning in which coercion stemming from the provision of public goods is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion, its difference from redistribtion, and its incorporation into social welfare optimization. The paper examines the implications for optimal policy, showing how the Samuelson condition, rules for optimal linear income taxation and commodity taxation, and for the marginal cost of public funds must be modified. In addition, the trade-off between social welface and coercion is mapped under specific conditions and the implications of this trade-off for normative policy choice are considered.Coercion, optimal linear income taxation, optimal commodity taxation, marginal cost of public funds, public goods, collective choice