Laura Kalambokidis

The current economic climate has placed significant pressure on the budgets of state and county governments. In turn, those governments have compelled state Cooperative Extension Services to defend their continued receipt of state and county funding. Even when policy makers are persuaded of the efficacy of an Extension program, they have questioned whether the program should be supported with scarce public dollars rather than through user charges.

Public sector economics addresses this very challenge by identifying the conditions that call for a service to be publicly funded. Those conditions include the classic cases of market failure­imperfect information, externalities, public goods, and natural monopoly­-as well as the desire of a community to ensure fairness and justice. When those conditions are met, collective action (possibly, though not necessarily, through government intervention) leads to general improvements in welfare. This presentation, based on a 2004 Journal of Extension article,[1] describes an approach for systematically applying the principles of public sector economics to Extension programs in order to formulate a persuasive argument for the programs’ public support.

The approach has been developed into a workshop in which Extension program teams assess whether and how the measured impacts of their programs address one or more of the economic justifications for government intervention. The presentation will describe the workshop and report the results of three pilot workshops for University of Minnesota Extension teams that took place in October 2002, and another workshop for North Carolina State University Extension teams in October 2004.

[1] Kalambokidis, Laura. “Identifying the Public Value in Extension Programs.” Journal of Extension 42, 2 (April 2004). http://www.joe.org/joe/2004april/a1.shtml

PowerPoint presentation (PDF format, 106 kb)