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Eur J Law Econ (2010) 30:201221
DOI 10.1007/s10657-010-9187-6
Ringa Raudla
Published online: 20 October 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract This article discusses the insights that Elinor Ostroms work on common-pool resources and governing the commons can provide for the literature on scal commons. Institutional approaches to public nance often employ the metaphor of budgetary commons. Although intuitively appealing, the notion of budgetary commons faces the danger of becoming a catch-all term that is simply taken as a starting point for an inquiry, without scrutinising the t between the metaphor and the actual setting. In addressing this shortcoming, the literature on budgetary commons can learn from Elinor Ostrom and the analytical approaches she has advocated in her research on natural commons. This article brings out insights from Ostroms work that would be particularly useful for institutional analysis of budgeting. It shows that institutional approaches to public nance can draw on Ostroms work with regard to the general approach for examining institutional congurations and their evolution over time, the analytical structures she uses for conceptualising the problems occurring on the commons, the desire to understand institutional complexity in real-life settings, and her scepticism of over-simplied models that are often used for describing and understanding the problems of common-pool resources.
Keywords Fiscal commons Budgetary institutions Constitutional law and
economics Institutional economics Constitutional economics
JEL Classication B52 H11 H30 H61 H62
R. Raudla (&)
Department of Public Administration, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia 3, 12618 Tallinn, Estoniae-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
Governing budgetary commons: what can we learn from Elinor Ostrom?
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1 Introduction
In explaining budgetary outcomes, institutional approaches have become increasingly popular, witnessed by a large number of studies that explore the effects of institutional variables on levels of public expenditure, revenue and budget decit. Some studies, represented most clearly by Persson and Tabellini (2003, 2004), focus on the impacts of broader political institutions (like electoral rules); others, inspired by Buchanan and his co-authors, examine the consequences of scal rules (like balanced budget rules, decit ceilings or debt limits); yet others have followed von Hagen (1992) and explore the effects of the rules of procedure guiding the preparation, adoption and implementation of the public budget.
What is common to all...