Public Safety as a Public Good

Abstract

Although it is rarely treated as such, public safety is an example for a non-tangible public commodity. As a consumption good, public safety can be measured by the expected damage (from any hazardous source) to any person residing or passing through the community. That is, the lower the expected damage the higher is the level of public safety consumed. Thus, for the following discussion, the public safety is considered and measured from its ex-ante point of view by the inverse value of the expected damage.¹ Following the definition of public good (see Samuelson (1954)) public safety is a non-excludable and non-rivalrous commodity. As a non-excludable commodity non-paying consumers are not (and cannot be) excluded from consuming this product. That is, just by staying in a community (or a certain locality) you get to consume its public safety independent of how much you have contributed towards the provision of this good. Second, public safety is not a rivalrous commodity. That is, when one consumer enjoys the high level of public safety the amount of public safety enjoyed by other consumers of the community is not reduced.²

A previous version of this paper was presented and benefited from comments made by the participants of the Advanced Workshop in Regulation and Competition, Newark, NJ, January 18, 2002. I am also grateful to Michael Crew and to Richard E. Schuler Jr. for their most helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

From a practical point of view, and with some simple assumptions about its production function, the value of the public safety could also be fully represented by the resource costs or inputs used in its production.

Public safety is a commodity that might be subject to congestion, especially when the emergency situation for different consumersis highly correlated.