바람직한 公共財 定義에 대한 고찰

A Consideration on the Desirable Definition of Public Goods

Considering the importance public good’s concept, efforts to improve on its definition have been curiously scanty. This study purports to find faults with the existing definitions of public good and present a better one. Three conditions are proposed for an ideal definition: First, assuming market failure derives exclusively from publicness, the conceptual set of public good must be identical to the set of market failure. Second and third, the definition must be independent of whether a good is collectively, respectively, demanded and supplied. As non-exclusion, and nothing else, causes market failure in the presence of a public benefit, the paper asserts that a public good must be characterized by non-exclusion, neither non-rivalry nor both. By taking non-rivalry for non-exclusion, Samuelson definition commits an error of including the case of non-rivalry and exclusion and excluding the case of rivaly and non-exclusion. By embracing both non-rivalry and non-exclusion as a prospective cause of publicness, Musgrave definition stops short of committing the second half of its counterpart’s errors.