When private goods are publicly provided at subsidized prices, government authorities have to determine the distribution of services on recipients. Such distributions are commonly based on legal regulations and professional guidelines. Thus governments are assumed to develop service standards that are incorporated in the preferences for allocation of services. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the behavior of local governments when they are allocating home-care services on elderly and disabled clients. Based on Norwegian data it is demonstrated that service standards as well as economic constraints have an impact on the supply of home-care. As expected the supply to individual clients increases with the degree of disablement. The model estimates also show that service standards vary substantially between different client groups. For instance, service levels for mentally retarded are rather high compared to elderly clients in non-single households. Individual service standards are derived from observed behavior by means of model simulation, where the standards are defined for an average level of municipal incomes and prices. The results are used to evaluate the degree of mismatch between service supply and common service standards in different local communities.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Research Department of Statistics Norway in its series Discussion Papers with number
288.
Find related papers by JEL classification: H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods H72 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Budget and Expenditures I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: