Albert Breton

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Economics

The chapter develops a hypothesis to account for the easily observed fact that the shrouding of information – such as the concealment, distortion, and falsification of information – is a feature of the supply side of both the private and public sectors. Consumers and citizens need information to make decisions. In some circumstances, suppliers – bu...

'This volume - the second by this editorial team - addresses many of the issues to be resolved if we are to manage environmental public goods efficiently and sustainably. What is the right scale of governance? What makes for effective public-private partnership? What makes governance systems effective? When do we need supranational governance? Give...

Parkinson's Law is the popular idea that bureaucrats or administrators are bound to multiply. The basis for the Law was Parkinson's observation that, in some organizations, the number of administrators continued to increase even when the organization, as measured either by its output or the size of its direct labour force, was declining. This paper...

In this work the authors present a general theory of bureaucracy and use it to explain behaviour in large organizations and to explain what determines efficiency in both governments and business corporations. The theory uses the methods of standard neoclassical economic theory. It relies on two central principles: that members of an organization tr...

This book examines how different countries define and address environmental issues, specifically in relation to intergovernmental relations: the creation of institutions, the assignment of powers, and the success of alternative solutions. It also investigates whether a systemic view of the environment has influenced the policy-making process. The b...

The objective of the paper is to formulate a hypothesis that can help explain the different patterns of environmental governance in three countries: Canada and the United States (both federal states) and Italy (a decentralized unitary state). To that effect, we will make use of what is a robust theory of the assignment of powers in federal and dece...

The competition that permeates the public sector acts as a force to discipline public sector actors. But it also serves to build links between the volume of goods and services supplied by public bodies and the prices that citizens must pay for them. Globalization, by permitting a greater mobility of capital, makes it possible for larger business co...

This study is primarily concerned with the security of transactions and contracts in contexts in which there is more than one legal system - in bijural (or multijural) societies - and with the contribution that bijural lawyers can make to the security of transactions and contracts, that is with the productivity of bijural lawyers. It is, as a conse...

Propositions related to intergovernmental equalization grants are always implicitly or explicitly derived from one model of government or another. The paper assumes that governments are competitive organisms. In such a frame of reference, equalization payments serve to insure that all the units in a decentralized governmental system have a chance t...

It is often asserted that the Italian Constitutional Court is not independent of the Executive and Legislative branches of the government in Rome. We offer a view of independence that is congruent with bodies such as constitutional courts. We argue that the evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, however poor it may be, indicates that the Ital...

In unitary states--states in which constitutional powers are owned by the central government--vertical competition can generate stable outcomes, that is outcomes that do not unravel through arbitrary repossessions by the center. Stability is a product of institutional commitment devices. Through these a democratic government, though it cannot bind...

Albert Breton and Pierre Salmon argue that the effects of constitutional rules depend on the nature of political competition and on some meta-rules that contain procedures regulating the application and the modification of constitutional rules. They outline two models of competition - electoral competition and compound government competition - and...

The traditional school of economic policy analysis predicts that globalisation will give rise to predatory competition between the governments of the European nation states. The consequence is anticipated to be a marked reduction in, if not the destruction of, the benevolent Welfare State. The objective of this contribution is to present the main a...

In a world in which barriers to trade at all levels—international and internal—are mostly a by-product of the implementation by governments of different regulatory policies to deal with “domestic” or “local” problems such as environmental degradation, health, and labor standards, the article purports to show how the mechanisms that are set in motio...

In a world in which barriers to trade at all levels - international and internal - are mostly a by-product of the implementation by governments of different regulatory policies to deal with "domestic" or "local" problems, the mechanisms that are set in motion by the operation of competition among the governments inhabiting the different jurisdictio...

When purchasing goods and services, governments often discriminate in favor of domestic suppliers. It is widely assumed that such behavior is motivated by protectionism. Although this interpretation is sometimes valid, it is also puzzling. After reviewing some of the puzzles, the paper proposes an alternative explanation of preferential procurement...

Competitive Governments explores in a systematic way the hypothesis that governments are internally competitive, that they are competitive in their relations with each other and in their relations with other institutions in society which, like them, supply consuming households with goods and services. Breton contends that competition not only serve...

The essay is restricted to the analysis of the relationship of superiors and subordinates (principals and agents) in large organizations. At the outset, three well-established, largely empirical, ‘sociological’ propositions are outlined. These are then used to assess three traditions in the economic analysis of bureaucratic organizations, namely th...

Conclusion In the preceding pages, I have returned time and again to the idea that in the next quarter century the profession will devote more of its resources to an understanding of politics and of political organizations, with a presumption that the behaviors and institutions we observe in the real world represent efficient responses to exogenous...

Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote. Given this assumption, the analyst could express the outcome of the voting...

I. Until about a dozen years ago, the economic analysis of the relationship between political preferences and political demands was a rather straightforward, if dull, subject. The most common assumption was that the only political instrument available to citizens was the vote. Given this assumption, the analyst could express the outcome of the voti...

This paper argues that to associate intergovernmental grants with the objectives of equity and efficiency implies that governments are irrational. The authors find long-term systematic irrationality in the behavior of any institution difficult to accept. The authors, therefore, propose that the factors which determine expenditure concentration in g...

This paper seeks to explain the broad pattern of regulation (repression of information) in markets for ‘ideas’. We consider four examples of ideas markets: commercial advertising: the courts, considered as a ‘market’ for truth, scientific ideas, and political speech. Since buyers cannot easily distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’ ideas, these markets are...

I. The concept of competition played a central role in the very first attempts to apply the tools of economics to the analysis of politics. Adopting Hotelling's (1929) industrial organization model of imperfect competition in markets in which space has a predominant role, Downs (1957), following on some perceptive insights of Schumpeter (1942), was...

The concept of competition played a central role in the very first attempts to apply the tools of economics to the analysis of politics. Adopting Hotelling’s (1929) industrial organization model of imperfect competition in markets in which space has a predominant role, Downs (1957), following on some perceptive insights of Schumpeter (1942), was ab...

Consumers are indifferent about the provenance of the goods and services they consume. Given their information, income, and preferences, they choose from the lowest price source--with price defined to include transaction and deadweight costs. There are many supply sources: families, charitable and humanitarian organizations, cooperatives, business...

The paper reexamines the question of the guilt of subordinates in large organizations, a question posed with special force by Hannah Arendt in her book on Adolf Eichmann. He consistently claimed innocence on the ground that he was only following orders. Arendt accepted this picture of the regime but nevertheless indicted him for "crimes against hum...

In the S CHUMPETER ‐D OWNS economic approach to politics, rational citizens vote to select a government that will supply policies to meet their preferences. There is no place in that logic for the variegated coalitions which are called political parties; voting itself is indeed irrational following J OHN S TUART M ILL'S view of the relationship bet...

I have tried to develop a simple point, namely that without trust, governing is more difficult, because it requires greater use of force. I have suggested that in a heterogeneous federal state the conditions for trust accumulation are more difficult to devise with regard to the national government. On the whole, I have noted that most provincial go...

In this work the authors present a general theory of bureaucracy and use it to explain behaviour in large organizations and to explain what determines efficiency in both governments and business corporations. The theory uses the methods of standard neoclassical economic theory. It relies on two central principles: that members of an organization tr...

Un modèle du comportement de gouvernements démocratiques est utilisé pour étudier les caractéristiques d'ententes réalisées dans des organismes, tel le GATT. Le résultat principal est que si un gouvernement est dans un état d'équilibre, tel que l'utilité des politiciens est maximale, avant une entente, tout déplacement de cet équilibre engendré par...

[eng] Representative governments and the formation of national-and international policies. Albert Breton. The paper presents and uses a simple model of government in representative democracies to model the properties of equilibrium agreements reached in international organizations, such as the GATT. The general conclusion is that if prior to « barg...

Moral suasion is usually thought of as a process whereby commercial banks co-operate with the central bank either for altruistic reasons or out of fear of administrative or legislative sanctions. This paper suggests an alternative hypothesis: moral suasion is an exchange between the central bank and the commercial banks. Specifically, it suggests t...

The primary effect of nationalistic policies is to alter the distribution of measured wealth in favour of a society's better-off citizens, though in certain circumstances these policies can also increase the volume of measured wealth. But nationalism, in addition, changes the distribution of measured wealth between the better-off, thus inducing con...

Student unrest and the yield on human capital. Student unrest is argued to be part of the mechanism through which increases in the flow of resources allocated to human capital by the public sector are prevented from becoming `excessive.' It is part of the network of forces which prevent societies from departing too dramatically from an equilibrium...

Some federal structures are and have been stable for relatively long periods; others, though apparently stable, are chronically subject to important strains, while others still are either unstable or have ceased to exist as federal entities. In the paper, I develop a limited model of federalism, built on the number and properties of public goods, w...

Reproduction. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Columbia University, 1965.

Government grants in federal countries account for a small share of the national product of these countries. I suppose that this, and the fact that federal arrangements are relatively flexible, explains why no well-organized body of economic doctrine deals with the issues raised by the existence of these grants. In terms of general principles, I ve...