| Author |
| Bird, Richard M. and Thomas Tsiopoulos | 1997 |
| Number of Pages: | 61 |
| User Charges For Public Services: Potential And Problems |
Abstract |
| Budgetary pressures are leading governments at all levels to turn increasingly to user charges to finance their |
| activities. Properly designed and applied, user charges can indeed play an important role in providing finance |
| for what governments do. What is important, they can also ensure that what governments do is what people |
| want and are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, it is by no means easy either to determine the appropriate |
| domain for user charges or to design and implement user charges when they are appropriate. |
| This article sets out some general principles that should be followed both in deciding which public sector |
| activities should be charged for and what charges should be imposed. The article also provides a brief |
| quantitative overview of user charges in Canada and considers some important aspects of proper charging |
| policy in several specific areas of current interest, ranging from parks to health care, at the provincial and |
| municipal levels. “Good” user-charge policy for any particular public sector activity depends upon the |
| specifics of all the factors set out in this article; we do not attempt to describe in detail the wide variety of |
| potentially relevant charges for public sector activities. The brief vignettes presented in the article are |
| intended as illustrations, not as definitive accounts. Finally, the article concludes by emphasizing the |
| importance of the appropriate design and implementation of user charges if the potential of “public pricing” is to |
| be realized in practice. |