Course description
Public economics is a branch of economics that studies the public sector. We might say that a public economist is an economist who studies the policies of a benevolent Government aimed at fighting market failures. If you think that the Governments is never benevolent and markets are perfectly efficient, public economics looks useless.
If however you believe that markets are not always perfect and that politicians sometimes care about their voters, the course of public economics is a good investment.
Public economics deals with the role, size and objectives of the public sector. Among them, market failure, the provision of public and merit goods, as well as distributional issues are the most prominent.