Maxime Desmarais-Tremblay is a PhD student at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France). He holds a Master degree in Philosophy & Economics from Paris 1, a M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Montréal and a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the same university. His main research interests are in the recent history and the philosophical foundations of modern theory of public finance. His visit to the CPNSS is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Dates of Visit: September 2015 - May 2016
Project Title: On the philosophical foundations of merit goods
Project Description: This project is an interdisciplinary conceptual inquiry on merit goods. This public finance concept has had a controversial history since it was coined by American economist Richard A. Musgrave in 1957. Merit goods are types of public services which could technically be provided by the market, but are nonetheless provided by the government. Over the years, transfers in kind to the poor and all sorts of public expenditures (culture, health, education) which do not fit the narrower definition of public good have been described as merit goods. In an individualistic normative theory of the public sector, merit goods have been seen as violations of consumers’ sovereignty and were deemed unacceptable by many economists.
This project touches upon topical questions such as (i) What are the respective limits of market and public allocation of goods? (ii) To what extent should the state be neutral toward consumptions choices? (iii) Can we identify a consistent and self-sufficient set of assumptions on agency and the institutional setting for a theory to be a useful guide for public policy in Western democracies? (iv) What purposes should an economic theory serve for civil society?