THE EFFECTS OF PUBLIC SERVICES PROVISION ON THE QUALITY OF URBAN LIFE

Broadly defined, our analysis is concerned with the ways a community organizes its service and development activities in neighborhoods to bring about improvements in the quality of urban life. In this dissertation we propose several analytic and evaluative models which make explicit some of the relationships that exist between budgetary and allocative decisions and their outcomes. Chapter 1 provides background for the research and reviews the literature.;In chapter 3 we develop a framework for analyzing the opportunity costs associated with community development block grant allocations to neighborhoods, and their effects on the tradeoff relations among various urban outcomes. A linear system of equations is used to show the impacts of community development activities on urban outcomes in different neighborhoods, with allowance made for interneighborhood spillover effects. This is embedded in a linear programming model which minimizes expenditure overrun of neighborhood grants, while seeking to achieve desired improvements in urban outcomes. The model can also be used to identify complementarities among urban outcomes in order to provide guidance for obtaining further improvements in certain dimensions of urban life without recourse to additional spending of public funds. A numerical example illustrates the types of analyses that can be effected with the proposed model.;A better knowledge of the attainable relations between social service activities and their outcomes can be obtained by examining the individual facilities where social services are delivered to the public. The underlying premise in our approach is that social service facilities are expected to provide the maximum amount of service for a given level of public and private resources. In chapter 4 we apply a method of analysis that involves measuring the relative productivity of child care centers by comparing their service outputs and resource inputs via an application of data-envelopment procedure to construct a service frontier. We illustrate the measurement of relative efficiency, of input factors productivity, of tradeoffs among service outcomes, and of returns to scale. The efficiency of Community Development Block Grant funded facilities is compared with centers that are funded by other sources in several models of service provision. Chapter 5 concludes with a summary of major results, policy implications, and suggestions for further research.;In chapter 2 we adapt a framework that is used to derive Leontief-type multipliers from the production accounts in the United Nations system of national economic accounts in order to construct neighborhood and program multipliers of community development activities. We divide expenditures on activities in various neighborhoods into public and private sector components. Based on certain assumptions about fixed proportions in the allocation of neighborhood expenditures by activity categories, a unique mappings is derived that transforms the allocation of public funds to a distribution of total expenditure in the city. The mapping takes the form of a multiplier in which some private sector activities are stimulated by public activities and these, in turn, stimulate additional private activities, and so forth. A numerical example illustrates the derivation of four multipliers for a city of three neighborhoods and six activities.