The Estimation of Production Cost of Local Public Goods with Environmental Difference

환경요인에 따른 지역공공재 생산비용의 격차 추정

This thesis focused on the extent of the area-by-area gap of the unit production cost that should be taken into account without exception in supply of the local public goods production cost. With the advent of the local autonomy era, what should be considered in the local governmen's production of the local public goods are the government's fiscal capacity and the environmental difference that shows up in accordance with the area's characteristics. Though with the same level of the fiscal capacity, an occurrence of environmental difference will lead inevitably to the different level of actual supply of the local public goods. The method of analysis used in this thesis was first to bring out implicit price, to combine this with induced expenditure function, to separate demand function parameter and cost function parameter, and then to analyzed the impact of environmental variables on the production cost. The environmental variables were set on the basis of the ones that affected expenditure per person of the public goods. The analysis was conducted in distinction of city areas and county areas. The results showed that, in cases of cities, more production cost of the public goods was in presence in urban areas and in areas where there was sluggish development. In other words, distinction could be drawn between areas where there was a large consumption of production cost resulting from poor environmental sparked by slow development and those where additional costs were required due to population concentration caused by a certain level of accomplished development. In the meantime, in cases of county areas, the results were around the same. However, a comparison between city areas and county ones told that overall difference between city areas was not that big in the production cost while that in county areas was large enough. In times ahead, in implementation of grant-in-aid scheme, production cost index for local public goods could be used as it was written in consideration of environmental characteristics of areas concerned.