Chapter 4 | Page 142 can draw on the strengths of these disciplines to investigate the ESC rights policy environment and the factors that affect relevant decisions. Resources are economic in nature. Therefore, different dimensions related to decision-making on resource mobilisation can be better understood from a number of economic approaches such as positive economics, normative economics, political economy, and public sector economics. Positive economics adopts the position of an outside observer in analysing public policy decisions and their channels of impact, whereas normative economics is concerned with the best approach to serve the goals of public policy, such as improving the standard of living or providing essential services.3 The normative economic approach thus considers the welfare effects of various policy choices.4 The political economy approach, on the other hand, takes the behaviour of private and public sector agents as endogenous to the system and as driven by their particular objectives and constraints.5 Public sector economics provides further insight into the role of the governments in the provision of essential public goods and services, including the effects of its involvement in the market, approaches to public finance, analysis and design of public policy, as well as the distributional and developmental effects of government fiscal policy.6 Drawing on these diverse economic perspectives, the following discussion examines key sources of domestic public sector revenue and the main issues around their application in economic policy. These inform the subsequent discussion on policy issues arising out of these macroeconomic tools. 3 Agnès Bénassy-Quéré et al, Economic Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). 4 See for example, Brian E Dollery and Andrew C Worthington, 'The Evaluation of Public Policy: Normative Economic Theories of Government Failure' (1996) 7(1) Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics 27-39. 5 Bénassy-Quéré et al, above n 3. 6 See, Joseph E Stiglitz and Jay K Rosengard, Economics of the Public Sector (W W Norton, New York, 2015).