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From Private to Public Provision of Public Goods: English Lighthouses Between the Seventeenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2013

ERIK LINDBERG
ERIK LINDBERG*
Affiliation:
Uppsala University
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Journal of Policy History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 538 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1. As cited in van Zandt, David E., “The Lessons from the Lighthouse: ‘Government’ vs. ‘Private’ Provision of Goods,” Journal of Legal Studies 22 (January 1993): 51.Google Scholar

2. Paul A. Samuelson, Economics, 6th ed. (New York, 1964), 45.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Peacock, Alan, “The Limitations of Public Goods Theory: The Lighthouse Revisited,” in The Economic Analysis of Public Goods Theory and Related Themes, ed. Robertson, Martin (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; Barrowclogh, Diana, “Lighthouses, Television, and the Theory of Public Goods,” in Keynes, Post-Keynsianism, and Political Economy: Essays in Honour of Geoff Harcourt, vol. 3, ed. Sardoni, Claudio and Kriesler, Peter (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Shleifer, Andrei, “State versus Private Ownership,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (Autumn 1998): 133–50Google Scholar; McCloskey, Deirdre, The Bourgeois Virtue: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Samuelson, Economics, 45.

7. Coase, Ronald H., “The Lighthouse in Economics,” Journal of Law and Economics 17 (October 1974): 375.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 359.

9. Lighthouses are still nonrivalry in consumption, because one shipper’s use of the light does not diminish the use for other shippers.

10. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 364.

11. Taylor, James, “Private Property, Public Interest, and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Case of the Lighthouses,” Historical Journal 44 (September 2001): 753.Google Scholar

12. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 375.

13. Van Zandt, “Lessons.”

14. Bertrand, Elodie, “The Coasean Analysis of Lighthouse Financing: Myths and Realities,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 30 (2006): 390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Domberger, Simon and Jensen, Paul, “Contracting Out by the Public Sector: Theory, Evidence, and Prospects,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 13 (1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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17. Taylor, “Private Property, Public Interest, and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 749–71.

18. “Selected Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State and Management of Lighthouses,” Parliamentary Papers, 1845, IX, p. iv.

19. Selected Committee 1845, vi.

20. Renegotiations before the grants had run out were not possible. Selected Committee 1845, 4.

21. William A. Fischel, “Public Goods Theory and Property Rights: Of Coase, Tiebout, and Just Compensation,” mimeo (2000).

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24. Jensen and Stonecash, “Incentives and the Efficiency of Public Sector-Outsourcing Contracts,” 770.

25. Selected Committee 1845, 28.

26. Roy M. MacLeod, “Science and Government in Victorian England: Lighthouse Illumination and the Board of Trade, 1866–1886,” Isis 60 (Spring 1969): 10.

27. See Jensen and Stonecash, “Incentives and the Efficiency of Public Sector-Outsourcing Contracts,” 777, for a discussion.

28. Domberger and Jensen, “Contracting Out by the Public Sector,” 70.

29. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1619–23 (1858), 57–68.

30. Ibid., 111–20.

31. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1623–25 (1859), 72–86.

32. Killigrew testified that many Dutch merchants approved of the lighthouse, but apparently not enough to give him voluntary rewards. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1619–23 (1858), 531–45.

33. Hague, Douglas B. and Christie, Rosemary, Lighthouses: Their Architecture, History, and Archeology (Llandysul, Wales, 1975), 32.Google Scholar

34. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1676–77 (1909), 1–55.

35. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1680–81 (1921), 97–124.

36. Taylor, “Private Property, Public Interest, and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”

37. D. Alan Stevenson, The World’s Lighthouses Before 1820 (London, 1959), 253.

38. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1634–35, 497–531.

39. Stevenson, The World’s Lighthouses Before 1820, 102.

40. Ibid., 106.

41. Ibid., 255.

42. Holmstrom, Bengt and Milgrom, Paul, “Multitask Principal-Agent Analysis: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 7 (1991 special issue): 50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 371.

44. Bertrand, “The Coasean Analysis of Lighthouse Financing,” 399.

45. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 362; G. G. Harris, The Trinity House of Deptford, 1514–1660 (London, 1969), 187.

46. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 364.

47. Stevenson, The World’s Lighthouses Before 1820, 133.

48. Cf. Van Zandt, “The Lessons from the Lighthouse,” 65.

49. Between 1818 and 1828, the contract for the lighthouses at Harwich, Dungeness, Winterton, and Orfordness included the novel clause that the residual should be divided between the Crown and lessees. Selected Committee 1834, liv.

50. Van Zandt, “The Lessons from the Lighthouse,” 68.

51. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1611–18 (1858), 291–300.

52. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1676–77 (1909), 1–55.

53. Stevenson, The World’s Lighthouses Before 1820, 140.

54. Selected Committee 1845, iv.

55. Selected Committee 1834, xiv.

56. Selected Committee 1845, iv.

57. Taylor, “Private Property, Public Interest, and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 761.

58. Domberger and Jensen, “Contracting,” 68.

59. Hague and Christie, Lighthouses, 29.

60. Patrick Bajari, Robert McMillan, and Steven Tadelis, “Auctions Versus Negotiations in Procurement: An Empirical Analysis,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 25 (2008): 372.

61. Ibid., 374.

62. Royal Commission to Inquiry into Condition and management of Lights, Buoys and Bacons on Coast of United Kingdom Report, 1861, xv.

63. Ibid., xiv.

64. Bertrand, “The Coasean Analysis of Lighthouse Financing,” 398.

65. Ibid., 399.

66. Selected Committee 1845, vii; Coase “Lighthouse,” 370.

67. Coase, “Lighthouse,” 370.

68. Ibid., 371.

69. Selected Committee 1845, vii.

70. Selected Committee 1834, xv.

71. Selected Committee 1845, xvii.

72. Selected Committee 1834, x.

73. Taylor, “Private Property, Public Interest, and the Role of the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 756.

74. Ibid., 749.

75. Ibid., 750.

76. Hague and Christie, Lighthouses, 42.

77. Selected Committee 1845, 402.

78. Ibid., 397.

79. Selected Committee 1834, 347.

80. Ibid., xxxi.

81. Bogart, Dan, Competition and Commitment: The Supply and Enforcement of Rights to Improve Roads and Rivers in England, 1600–1750, Working Papers 070817 (University of California–Irvine, Department of Economics, 2008), 2.Google Scholar

82. Sylla, Richard and Sidney, Homer, A History of Interest Rates, 5th ed. (Hoboken, N.J., 2005).Google Scholar

83. Dan Bogart, “Were Statutory Authorities Second-best? Examining the Benefits, Costs, and Alternatives to British Institutions in the Eighteenth Century,” paper presented at the XVth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, 2009.