The Res Publica. Re-assessing the role of the public sector and the public interest

TU Wien, Lecture Hall W5, Augasse 2-6, 1090 Vienna

Thursday, 8 June 2017, 18:00 - 20:00  Presentation of the book "Public or Private Goods? Redefining Res Publica" and of the "Egon Matzner Prize of Socio-Economics 2017"

Friday, 9 June 2017, 09:00 - 16:30  Conference presentations

Conference organized by
Centre of Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy (IFIP), Department of Spatial Planning, TU Wien

in cooperation with
USE, Utrecht School of Economics, The Netherlands, and
EAEPE, European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy

Content of the Annual Conference

1. What is public and why should something be in public responsibility? Which criteria, and theoretical and empirical arguments are relevant to determine
whether the provision, and financing of a good is a public or private responsibility, or a mixture of both?

2. Who determines what is public and what is private? Which actors do what? And why are they doing this? How is the public intervention justified?
How can one decide whether there is a role for public intervention, and given there is a role for public intervention, who intervenes and how?“
(Excerpt from the introduction to the book „Public or Private Goods? Redefining Res Publica“, ed. B. Unger, D. v.d. Linde, M. Getzner, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2017)