The Microeconomics of Public Policy Analysis

(Hardback)

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Description

This title aims to show how microeconomics should be used in the analysis of public policy problems. It provides a way to learn microeconomics, motivated by its application to important, real-world issues. Lee Friedman offers the microeconomic tools necessary to understand policy analysis of a range of public concerns - including the California electricity crisis, welfare reform, public school finance, global warming, health insurance, day care, tax policies, college loans and mass transit pricing. These issues are scrutinised through microeconomic models that identify policy strengths, weaknesses and ideas for improvements. The book has two complementary goals. One is to develop skills of economic policy analysis: to design, predict the effects of and evaluate public policies. The other is to develop a deep understanding of microeconomics as an analytic tool for application - its strengths and extensions into such advanced technologies as general equilibrium models and pricing methods for natural monopolies and its weaknesses, such as behavioural inconsistencies with utility-maximalization models and its limits in comparing institutional alternatives.

Reviews

"An important book. It should have a major impact in schools of policy, planning, and administration, and even in some economics departments. Friedman does a great job of applying the theory to important real-world problems." - David Howell, New School University "The Microeconomics of Public Policy Analysis will quickly become the most widely used text in graduate schools of public affairs and will be an attractive text for use in advanced undergraduate economics courses. This is one of the few books I know of that a noneconomist can skim through and end up with a reasonable understanding of the key economic concepts central to the study of policy analysis." - Samuel L. Myers, Jr., University of Minnesota

Author Bio

Lee S. Friedman is an economist and Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley. A recipient of the David N. Kershaw Award for distinguished public policy research, he is the author of Microeconomic Policy Analysis (McGraw-Hill) and numerous articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the official journal of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, whose presidency he also held.