英语论文网

Rail has and will continue to play an important role in the Nation’s freight transportation system. What of inter-city passenger rail? Compared to many studies of intracity rail, fewer cost-benefit studies have been undertaken of intercity passenger rail. But the available data suggest that in the U.S. system, the only lines that may yield benefits in line with costs are in the Northeast Corridor. The financial performance of Amtrak, and even more instructively the dismal economics of more technically advanced systems in much denser France and Japan, makes it hard to imagine that the mooted Midwest high speed intercity rail network would be any more viable than today’s Amtrak.

Governments not only tax and spend and invest in infrastructure; they also regulate. The panoply of regulations affecting business is so broad that some have championed 'regulatory audits,' studies of the broad range of regulations affecting business and economic development. Such studies lay out recommendations for regulatory reform in the areas of land use, regulation of professions and occupations, environmental regulations, regulation of rental housing, development and building codes, labor regulation, street vending, and parking.

Many 'general' or 'traditional' functions of government, not usually thought of as development policies per se, may have strong effects on economic development. For example, it's hard to attract footloose industries to locations that have high crime, or poor fire protection, or where trash collection is 'hit or miss.' Many authors and conventional wisdom suggest that economic development can be adversely affected by high crime rates, although strong relationships are surprisingly difficult to find in the empirical literature.

A range of strong views exist on how metropolitan governance affects or does not affect economic development and standards of living. On the one hand, much of the work of professional urban economists is informed by something called the Tiebout model, which posits a world of many competing small jurisdictions, each offering its own tax and service packages. In such a world, different households are assumed to have different tastes and needs for various tax and service packages and, at least in the long run, they will move to the jurisdiction that offers the most efficient choice. Among other pluses, the Tiebout model imbeds the notion of consumer sovereignty in public services; it gets around the problem of our inability to learn the true demand for public goods.

But the Tiebout model has its dark side. The model starts to collapse if there is to be any implicit or explicit redistribution of income by local governments. We often think of this redistribution in the classic form of cash payments (e.g., welfare), but many other kinds of government spending ha本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。