The Character of the Subject in Historical Perspective

There is a straightforward prima facie explanation of the late internationalization of public economics: the nation-specific institutional features embedding public budgeting processes had a deep and lasting impact on the subject.

Public finance should not be confined to a collection of technical tools to be handled by subaltern bureaucrats: this kind of public finance is “the most boring subject on earth”, as Schumpeter puts it. Moreover, Schumpeter’s emphasis on the scope of the interdependences embedding typical issues of public economics highlights the fact that the latter is not a discipline dealing only with technicalities in the context of public budgets in the sense of narrow cameralistic Finanzwissenschaft. Nor is it one of several sub-disciplines of applied economics, as some narrow view of the Anglo-Saxon tradi­tion in public finance might have it. Only views of public finance steering clear of (1) the explanation and justification of public expenditures, (2) the logic of political mechanisms of collective choice, and (3) the co-evolution of the public sector within the dynamism of modern market economies could be thought of either as a sub-discipline or a narrowly technical exercise concerned with budgeting procedures.