Public goods. Classification. Characteristics

The economic system of the state performs a number of important tasks. One of them is the production of services and goods for citizens. These public goods are useful for many people (for example, bridges, defense of the country and others). As a rule, such production to the private sector is unprofitable, and the state takes it upon itself.

If the provision of the good to the individual is impossible without giving to others and consuming in common, it is called pure public. An example is the civil defense of the population, since it concerns everyone and everyone in the same degree. Thus, pure public goods are goods and services, the benefits from the use of which are inseparably distributed throughout the society. At the same time, the distribution of benefits does not depend on the desire of individual citizens to purchase or not acquire them (services and goods).

Pure public goods have two characteristics. The first - the lack of competition in consumption - indicates that when the number of consumers increases, the utility delivered to each of them never decreases. If the net public goods are provided to the individual consumer, the costs are zero. With an increase in the number of consumers, the Pareto-improvement principles are fulfilled (compared to the previous state in the changed economic situation, no one lost and some participants in economic relations even won).

The second feature - non-exclusivity - is that the producer of public goods does not have the ability to remove the consumer from use. Suppliers are not in a position to enter into separate economic relations with each consumer.

Net public goods are not bought on the market. They are paid for through the system of state taxation.

In connection with the fact that consumption of public goods is accompanied by positive effects for all citizens, the economic system should rationally solve problems not by distribution, but to ensure the necessary volume of their production.

Of course, the classification is not limited to the concepts of private and general consumption and their characteristics. In this case, the applied characteristics may have different degrees of manifestation with respect to one or another product or service. Thus, both the private and the public good can have non-selectivity (or other attributes).

The benefits of selectivity to a high degree and exclusion in the low, are called the benefits of joint consumption. However, restrictions on consumption and use are associated with high costs. As a rule, such goods include beaches, parks, places of public visit, in connection with which they are also called communal ones. The joint nature of their use contributes to the emergence of a high level of competition on the principle of "who came first, he also uses the first."

The benefits that have a high level of exclusion and a low degree of selectivity are called excluded collective (public). In this case, access to their use can be (with little cost) limited. In some situations, the level of non-selectivity of the good may decline in accordance with the increase in the number of consumers. At the same time, from a certain point (from the "point of congestion"), the provision to additional consumption is associated with an increase in certain costs - with a decrease in utility for consumers.

Those benefits, in the consumption of which non-competition persists within a specific number of consumers, are called overloaded. So, for example, with an increase in the number of users, congestion of the roadway increases, and therefore the speed of traffic decreases.

The demand for public goods is set in accordance with the degree of their marginal utility for consumers at each specific price level.