ABSTRACT
Conventional attempts to explain the variations in public expenditure on the part of local authorities in the Western world have not proved particularly successful. Although parks consume a small proportion of the local authority budget, they are as good a place as any to start because this item has firmly resisted satisfactory analysis in the past. Sewage expenditure is another which resists satisfactory analysis in conventional demographic studies. It correlates weakly with only a few social and economic variables, and no political ones, and regression explains no more than twenty per cent of its variance. Refuse is yet another service cost which has weak associations with population characteristics. Housing is the first divisible service discussed so far, and it is also the first which is well explained by the demographic approach. Planning expenditure constitutes a small part of local authority budgets (less than half a per cent) and, of course, a good deal can be done without spending much money.
