Review 4: Bureaucracy and Public Economics, by William A. Niskanen (1994)

S. Sayer, The Economic Journal Vol. 106, No. 434 (1996)

"The major part of this volume is a long overdue reprint of Niskanen's seminal book Bureaucracy and Representative Government, originally published in 1971 which develops and extends the economic model of bureaucracy first set out in Niskanen's 1968 American Economic Review article, also reprinted in this volume. Rereading Niskanen's book-length treatment remains a valuable experience. It is more wide-ranging and richer in content than is suggested by the simple version of the Niskanen model of a budget-maximising bureaucrat expounded in texts on public economics. Niskanen now regards the framework of Bureaucracy and Representative Government as clearly incomplete and in an important sense also wrong, and prefers a framework based on the view that bureaucrats act to maximize their discretionary budget, 'defined as the difference between the total budget and the minimum cost of producing the output expected by the political authorities'. A revised model, based on this objective together with various other refinements concerning the role of the bureau's sponsor and the range of bargaining between bureau and sponsor, was developed by Niskanen in his 1975 article in the Journal of Law and Economics. A reprint of this article and a more recent assessment, written specially for this volume, provide the final two chapters of Bureaucracy and Public Economics. With the exception of this reassessment, the volume's contents are likely to be already available in well-stocked, and many not so well-stocked, libraries. Given this accessibility, it is difficult to claim that this volume should be a high priority purchase at a time when libraries' book-buying budgets (as distinct from discretionary budgets!) are hard-pressed. Nevertheless, Edward Elgar are to be commended for making Niskanen's important and highly topical contributions more readily available to a new generation of scholars and enabling some less well-stocked libraries to fill an important gap in their collection. "