Demand for National Public Goods: Estimates From Surveys

This paper presents an empirical method of estimating aggregate demand functions for national public goods. The technique combines survey responses and tax incidence figures in a probit model. The model provides estimates of average willingness‐to‐pay for federal government services and simultaneously regresses these estimates on socioeconomic characteristics, thus obtaining estimates of the demand function. The main findings are that demand for defense, space, foreign aid, welfare, education and aid to cities is a concave function of income, a negative function of expenditure level (generally) and dependent upon such characteristics as race, age, education level, and sex.