A central theme of the" reinventing government" literature is the extent to which substituting competition for monopoly provision in the delivery of public goods can produce demonstrable improvements in social welfare in a wide range of policy contexts. I Because government provision is seen to be beset by endemic efficiency and accountability problems, competition proponents claim that social welfare is enhanced by having governments either finance citizens directly, or finance (in whole or in part) private suppliers (profit or non-profit) who compete to earn the patronage of governments and community organizations acting on behalf of citizens. Through such decentralized delivery, the government can achieve its policy objectives at lower cost and in a more innovative and responsive fashion. In a central aphorism from this literature, governments are better at" steering" rather than" rowing." 2

The voucher instrument is one of the most frequently endorsed mechanisms for achieving the promise of decentralized delivery of government-supported goods and services. We will adopt a functional rather than formal definition of the voucher concept, including within the voucher concept any form of tied demand-side subsidy activated by consumer choice, whether in the form of tax deductions, tax credits, or universal or means-tested consumer entitlements reimbursable by government, irrespective of accounting details as to how payments are made to suppliers. While all of these mechanism seeks to subsidize targeted forms of consumer choice, they are not equivalent in other respects, particularly their distributional implications, which tend to become more progressive as one proceeds down this list of voucher instruments. These differences aside, the argument in favor of vouchers is simple: once governments decided to intervene in a given policy area, for a host of different rationales, including equity or distributional rationales, by conferring explicit, targeted subsidies on individual citizens, decisions regarding the consumption and production of publicly supported goods and services will be made more efficiently. Vouchers place resources directly into the hands of citizens, where they, rather than a governmental agent, will determine which goods ind services to consume from a number of competing suppliers, thereby increasing the likelihood that citizen preferences in the consumption of publicly supported