Local authority education expenditure in England and Wales: Why standards differ and the impact of government grants
✍ Scribed by Richard Jackman; John Papadachi
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Year
- 1981
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 756 KB
- Volume
- 36
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-5829
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
426 allocated between services, or used to reduce 16cfil taxes, according to the local authority's preferences. The linear expenditure system provides an analytically convenient framework for distinguishing 'committed' from 'discretionary' elements in expenditure (Stone, 1954, and for an application to local government expenditure, Inman, 1971).
This procedure generates a system of equations relating expenditure to the various budgetary factors, committed expenditures and the local authority's preferences. We have no explicit model of the factors likely to cause differences in local authorities' committed expenditures, or in their preferences. Our procedure, therefore, is to estimate, by regression analysis, equations relating expenditure to the factors thought likely to affect either costs or preferences, together with variables generated from the budget constraint. The use of regression analysis in this way provides information on the correlation between the different variables, but cannot be regarded as a test of the linear expenditure model specification. The regression results are presented in Section 3, and very briefly compared with estimates from other studies.
From the regression estimates it is possible to compute the contributions of the various factors to the observed variation in expenditure, both individually and in combination. In Section 4 we discuss some of the more interesting of these estimates.