Question

Art galleries, museum, road and bridges are usually provided by government. What happen     when access to these goods become congested? Should the government begin to start charging a fee? Why or why not

Answer 1

What are Quasi-Public Goods?

A quasi-public good is a near-public good i.e. it has many but not all the characteristics of a public good. Quasi public goods are:

Semi-non-rival: up to a point, extra consumers using a park, beach or road do not reduce the space available for others. Eventually beaches become crowded as do parks and other leisure facilities. Open access Wi-Fi networks become crowded
Semi-non-excludable: it is possible but often difficult or expensive to exclude non-paying consumers. E.g. fencing a park or beach and charging an entrance fee; building toll booths to charge for road usage on congested routes

If the government services became congested, they cannot charge fee to reduce that. Because there are some trade- off between these.  

`maximising economic efficiency' conventionally to mean the same as `maximising community welfare/social welfare'. Conventionally, we assume that total community welfare is the sum of the welfares (satisfactions, utilities) of all individuals, and that it is improved by any change in which the winners' gains outweigh the losers' losses (and vice versa). In the present context, this means that if the lost satisfaction of a would-be visitor discouraged by an entry fee is not compensated by a gain somewhere else in the economy, it is a loss to `total community welfare'. This conceptual scheme disregards issues to do with distributional justice.

`Fees discourage potential visitors'
Many submissions argued that user charges would discourage potential visitors, particularly poorer people. The proposition is presented as a problem because all accepted that wide public use of these public facilities is a fundamental good (this contrasts with the position of private enterprise, where `discouraging potential visitors' might well be the rational course if a business finds it can maximise profit by niche-marketing an expensive service to a few people). The argument was made more strongly in relation to museums and galleries than national parks, probably because of the greater underlying concern in museum circles about the need for affirmative action to broaden their appeal.

Please rate my answer