"Public finance" (government finance) is the field of economics that deals with budgeting the revenues and expenditures of a public sector entity, usually government. Governments, like any other legal entity, can take out loans, issue securities and invest. Based on the taxing authority of the entity, they issue bonds such as tax increment bonds or revenue bonds. A "public bond" or security may give tax advantages to its owners.
Government efficiency - how efficient are governments at obtaining their objectives? how much of their expenditure actually goes to where it is intended? what types of waste exist?
Scope of government activities - what do governments spend money on? what should governments spend money on? what can be left to markets? Why governments should be concerned with externalities, public goods.
Externalities and Government Policy
Internalization of externalities
The Coase Theorem. The Coase theorem is the idea that government, with the power to establish the rights to use resources, can internalize externalities when transaction costs of bargaining are zero.
Income distribution - How will these government expenditures influence the incomes of one group relative to another group? Government programs like ?disaster relief? transfer wealth to people that have suffered a loss due to natural disaster. Social security transfers wealth from the young to the old. Engaging in a war transfers wealth to certain sectors of society. Public education transfers wealth to families with children in these schools. Public road construction transfers wealth from people that do not use the roads to those people that do (and to those that build the roads).
Income Security
Employment insurance
Health Care
Financing
Income redistribution effects of the various types of taxes and types of borrowing
Military spending is a key phenomenon in order to understand various aspects of economic history: the cost, funding, and burden of conflicts; the creation of nation states; and in general the increased role of government in everyone’s lives especially since the nineteenth century.
The study of defense economics and military spending patterns as such is related to the immense expansion of military budgets and military establishments in the Cold War era.
Publicspending especially in the 1920s was in turn very static by nature, plagued by budgetary immobility and standoffs especially in Europe.
PublicFinance, field of economics concerned with how governments raise money, how that money is spent, and the effects of these activities on the economy and on society.
Publicfinance studies how governments at all levels—national, state, and local—provide the public with desired services and how they secure the financial resources to pay for these services.
In many industrialized countries, spending and taxation by the government form a large portion of the nation's total economic activity.
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