Robert Bish

Professor Emeritus, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria

Robert Bish earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Indiana University in 1968 and served in departments or schools of economics, public affairs, public administration and urban studies at the universities of Washington, Southern California and Maryland before joining the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria in 1981.

Prof. Bish co-founded the Local Government Institute at the university and has continued to work and publish with the Institute since his retirement in 1998. Prof. Bish has researched, consulted and published on local government in both the U. S. and Canada.

His major works include The Public Economy of Metropolitan Areas (1971); Understanding Urban Government: Metropolitan Reform Reconsidered (1973) with Vincent Ostrom; Financing Government (1973) with Harold Groves; Urban Economics and Policy Analysis (1975) with Hugh O. Nourse; Local Government in the United States (1988) with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, Indian Government: Its Meaning in Practice ( 1989) with Frank Cassidy and Local Government in British Columbia (1987, 1990, 1999).

Prof. Bish is included in the Who's Who in Economics, where selection for inclusion is based on the number of times an economist's work is cited by other scholars in academic work.

Recent Research by Robert Bish

— Mar 30, 2016
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governing greater victoria

“Amid proposals to replace regional districts with a reduced number of governments (i.e.: municipal amalgamation) Governing Greater Victoria: The Role of Elected Officials and Shared Services describes the structure and advantages of regional districts where neighbouring municipalities voluntarily share services such as water supply, sewerage disposal and solid waste management.”

— Sep 22, 2004
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Property taxes are an extremely important tax for the kind of local government structure we have in British Columbia. They finance local services by municipalities and regional districts and schools by the provincial government. Most of the services that property taxes finance are for the area where the taxes are raised.