Weakly democratic regular tax equilibria in a local public goods economy with perfect consumer mobility

The authors study the existence of equilibria in a local public goods economy which has the following structure. There are a finite number of geographical regions. Each region has a government which provides public goods locally by buying private goods inputs on competitive markets and transforming these inputs into outputs of public goods by using a convex technology. The local public goods are pure in the sense that all the local residents consume the total produced, with no spillovers to other regions. Each regional government raises revenue from the residents of its region to cover the costs of the public goods it provides. The local governments are assumed to be weakly democratic in the sense that no public sector proposal will be enacted for which there exists an alternative proposal which is unanimously preferred by the local residents.