The macroeconomics of unbalanced growth and the expanding public sector: Some simple tests of a model of government growth

A now classic model of public sector growth is Baumol's (1967) ‘Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth’. That model implies that one cause of public sector expenditure growth is a low or zero rate of productivity growth in the public sector relative to the private sector. Previous studies have tested, and partially confirmed, the Baumol hypothesis by computing productivity indices for various public sector activities. In this paper I attempt to test that model in a more direct manner. The unbalanced growth model is used to predict growth rates of per capita government expenditures, government's share of GNP and the pattern of government expenditure growth. These predictions are compared with observed growth rates of aggregate government expenditures. The model predicts the growth rate aggregate government expenditures, the growth rate of government's share of GNP, and the pattern of government expenditure growth reasonably well, and the data tend to support the Baumol model.     

外商投资、贸易开放度与中国财政支出结构

文章采用空间计量经济方法,利用空间和时间固定效应的空间自回归模型和空间误差模型,就外商直接投资、贸易开放度与我国地方政府公共支出结构之间的关系进行分析。得出以下结论:我国各省的地方财政总支出及其主要构成部分存在显著的空间相关性;外商直接投资限制了政府部门规模,降低了总支出水平及其主要构成部分的支出水平,支持效率假说的推断;贸易开放度扩张了政府部门规模,提高了总支出水平及其主要构成部分的支出水平,支持补偿假说的推断。     

中国共享式经济增长实证研究——基于公共支出、部门效应和政府治理的分析

文章首先基于多维贫困指标SHPI构建了共享式增长指数PEG,然后运用公共支出、政府治理水平和部门效应三个方面的指标来考察共享式增长。文章具体通过协整和误差修正模型分析了长期和短期影响共享式增长的主要因素及其调整机制,并在此基础上重点估计了各部门公共支出对共享式增长的影响。文章发现1978-2008年中国经济增长总体上具有共享性,但是大部分年份的共享程度较低。长期内,在公共支出、部门效应和政府治理水平三大类因素中公共支出方面的三个变量对PEG的影响最大。短期内,政府一般性支出和政府规模对共享式增长程度有非常显著的消极影响。     

Chapter 3. Domestic Demand — Household, Business and Public

Real public sector demand rose by 1.9 per cent in 1976–77 and we have forecast a similar rise in 1977–78. However, when real public demand is adjusted to exclude expenditure by Qantas for the deliveries of planes real growth is only about 1 per cent. This picture is slightly more optimistic than the one presented in Review 2'77 when we forecast a decline of 1.5 per cent in real public sector demand. For the second half of 1978 we have assumed an annual rate increase in real total public sector demand of about 4 per cent.     

Continuity and Change: Labour Market Programs and Education Expenditure

Since 1971 Australian governments have varied expenditure on labour market programs and education. This article attempts to explain these changes in the context of several straightforward hypotheses concerned with political processes. In both policy areas the evidence is generally consistent with four views: that ALP governments spend relatively more than coalition governments; that ALP expenditure is more likely to be directed to the public sector, and coalition expenditure to the private sector; that governments of both political persuasions tend to move towards their opponents' position in budgets immediately preceding elections; and that, after the marked changes initiated in the 1972 to 1974 period, the parties have become increasingly similar in expenditure terms. Apparently there have been important differences between the political parties in government, but these distinctions have become less clear–cut over recent years.     

Aid, Economic Reform, and Public Sector Fiscal Behavior in Developing Countries

This paper looks at interactions between foreign development aid, economic reform, and public sector fiscal behavior. It proposes a model of the public sector fiscal response to aid inflows, which allows for changes in structural relationships due to an exogenously imposed program of economic reform. This model is applied to 1960–99 time series data for the Philippines, which embarked on an IMF- and World Bank-funded structural adjustment program in 1980. Estimates of structural and reduced-form equations paint a dismal picture of the effectiveness of foreign aid to, and the structural adjustment program in, the Philippines so far as fiscal impacts are concerned. Both bilateral and multilateral aid inflows, and the presence of an economic reform program, are associated with decreases in public fixed capital expenditure, decreases in taxation and other recurrent revenue, and decreases in public sector saving. Multilateral aid also appears to be highly fungible.     

STRUCTURAL CHANGE THROUGH PUBLIC EDUCATION EXPENDITURE: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

Under China's hukou system, I analyze the relationship between public education expenditure and structural change as measured by labor transfer from the agricultural to the industrial sector. I construct a two‐sector general equilibrium model, which shows that in the short term, public education expenditure crowds out industrial capital accumulation and temporarily hinders structural change, but in the long term, public education expenditure permanently reduces rural residents' education costs. An inverted U‐shape relationship implied by the empirical evidence indicates that China's current public education expenditure is far from optimal, suggesting that China should increase it, especially for rural residents. (JEL I28, O11, O15)     

Electoral cycles in perceived corruption: International empirical evidence

I examine whether elections influence perceived corruption in the public sector. Perceived corruption in the public sector is measured by the reversed Transparency International's Perception of Corruption Index (CPI). The dataset includes around 100 democracies over the period 2012–2016, a sample for which the CPI is comparable across countries and over time. The results show that the reversed CPI was about 0.4 points higher in election years than in other years, indicating that perceived corruption in the public sector increased before elections. The effect is especially pronounced before early elections (1.0 points) compared to regular elections (0.4 points). Future research needs to investigate why perceived corruption in the public sector increased before elections.     

Growth effects of public expenditure on the state and local level: evidence from a sample of rich governments

There is a vast empirical literature investigating the relationship between government size and economic growth. But the empirical evidence of growth effects of public expenditure using cross-country regressions is still inconclusive. According to a number of authors this is not surprising since the negative relationship only applies for rich countries with a large public sector. Restricting their analysis on rich countries only they can show the predicted negative impact. Naturally, a selection of a sub-sample of rich countries is always somewhat arbitrary. Another possibility is to concentrate on governments within a rich country. However, only few studies investigate the effect of state and local spending on economic growth. This study concentrates on the relationship between public expenditure and economic growth within a rich country using the full sample of state and local governments from Switzerland over the 1981–2001 period. The general finding is a fairly robust negative relationship between government size and economic growth. However, in contrast to public spending from operating budgets there is no significant impact on economic growth by expenditure from capital budgets.     

Fiscal Consequences of Monetary Integration within a Common Economic Area: The Case of Belarus,Kazakhstan and Russia

This article analyses the possible impact of planned monetary integration on public sector revenue from seigniorage in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia. Using the concept of total gross seigniorage, we investigate the main sources and uses of the central bank revenue in these countries. Special attention is given to the role of seigniorage revenue in financing public sector expenditure. Amounts of yearly transfers from central banks to the state budget in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia are evaluated, and the size of potential gains and losses in seigniorage revenue under different scenarios of monetary integration are estimated.     

A note on ‘trying to value a life’

Broome's alleged paradox that application of the usual compensation test to the valuation of life would produce an infinite monetary value is shown to be false because it is based on illegitimate generalisation from a special case in which no effective compensation is possible. In the general case, relevant to public sector project appraisal, such compensation is possible, and finite values are to be expected, judging by people's ordinary behaviour.     

Public sector efficiency: evidence for new EU member states and emerging markets

In this article, we analyse public sector efficiency in the new member states of the EU compared to that in emerging markets. After a conceptual discussion of expenditure efficiency measurement, we compute efficiency scores and rankings by applying a range of measurement techniques. The study finds that expenditure efficiency across new EU member states is rather diverse especially as compared to the group of top performing emerging markets in Asia. Econometric analysis shows that higher income, civil service competence and education levels as well as the security of property rights seem to facilitate the prevention of inefficiencies in the public sector.     

Money for nothing: The dire straits of medical practice in Delhi,India

The quality of medical care received by patients varies for two reasons: differences in doctors' competence or differences in doctors' practice. Using medical vignettes, we evaluated competence for a sample of doctors in Delhi. One month later, we observed the same doctors in their practice. We find three patterns in the data. First, doctors do less than what they know they should do. Second, the more competent the doctor, the greater the effort exerted. Third, competence and practice diverge in different ways in the public and private sectors. Urban India pays a lot of “Money for Nothing”: in the private sector there is a lot of expenditure on unnecessary drugs. In the public sector, education subsidies and salary payments translate into little (and in small clinics, very little) effort and care. Provider training has a small impact on the actual quality of advice; under the circumstances, awareness campaigns to create a more informed clientele may be the best option.     

Waste not,want not: The efficiency of health expenditure in emerging and developing economies

Public health spending is low in emerging and developing economies relative to advanced economies and health outputs and outcomes need to be substantially improved. Simply increasing public expenditure in the health sector, however, may not significantly affect health outcomes if the efficiency of this spending is low. This paper quantifies the inefficiency of public health expenditure and the associated potential gains for emerging and developing economies using a stochastic frontier model that controls for the socioeconomic determinants of health, and provides country‐specific estimates. The results suggest that African economies have the lowest efficiency. At 2009 spending levels, they could boost life expectancy up to about 5 years if they followed best practices.     

Does Government Expenditure Crowd Out Private Consumption in Italy? Evidence from a Microeconomic Model

An abnormal expansion of the public sector may create serious problems to the market economy, as the literature suggests. This issue is quite important in countries such as Italy where the size of the public sector and of its debt are quite relevant. In this paper a model, in the microeconomic tradition, is developed and applied to the italian economy using a quite general utility function to represent consumer's behaviour. The aim of the article is to set up a methological framework in which to test for the hypothesis that the provision of public and impure public goods crowds out private consumption. The main result of the analysis is that, in Italy, traditional public goods play a neutral role in expenditure decisions while impure public goods crowd out private consumption. This crowding out is created by over-production of these services; merit goods are direct complements to a wide range of private goods, but this beneficial effect is more than offset by the negative income effect related to their financing.     

Entrepreneurs' capital accumulation behavior and long-run equilibrium

The purpose of this paper is to derive some interesting results on long-run equilibrium by considering entrepreneurs' capital accumulation behavior explicitly. Our framework is a two class, two production sector model in order to analyze the dynamic stability properties in the cases of Kaldor's saving assumption and Pasinetti's saving assumption. We shall introduce a further adjustment mechanism: the speeding up (slowing down) of capital accumulation in that sector in which the rate of profit is higher (lower).     

Subjectivism,joint consumption and the state: Public goods in Staatswirtschaftslehre *

Abstract

On the basis of F.B.W. Hermann's Staatswirthschaftliche Untersuchungen and of major German, Austrian and Swedish contributions to public economics, two specific claims with regard to the Germanic influence in the development of public expenditure theory are put forward in this paper. It is contended that the German achievements concerning the conceptual clarification of public goods are: (i) important as conceptual ingredients of the modern ‘micro-based’ theory of the public sector: (ii) less closely linked to some historical and intellectual German Sonderweg (culminating in historism, a collectivistic view of social entities and a mystical glorification of the State) than is often suggested.

It is argued that these achievements rather were to a large extent inspired by the more cosmopolitan tendencies in German thought. An important influence is Kantian liberalism. Kant construed a kind of foundational interdependence between the public and the private sector. This prepares the ground for a framework of complementary institutions instead of explaining public institutions in terms of a market failure-perspective based on non-excludability: the view developed in German Idealism gives non-rivalry the pivotal role: the explanation of public institutions systematically hinges upon the existence of goods, the benefits of which are necessarily universal and hence are necessarily made available in a non-rival mode.     

A note on the validation of cost push

Using a standard macroeconomic model, the question of the government's response to wage push is considered. It is shown that a decision to maintain public expenditure in money rather than real terms has two consequences. One is that the budget may move in a perverse direction and possibly destabilise the economy. The second is that, if the budget behaves normally, output and employment will fall more and prices rise less than would otherwise by the case.     

Visibility estimates of budgetary burden and benefit in European countries

Intermediate territorial levels of government in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain are different regarding their basic institutions, devolved powers, revenue and public expenditure systems, public revenue equalization mechanisms, accountability, public performance management, and financial control bodies. In spite of the complexity derived from these different characteristics, this paper presents some indicators which permit the creation of time and space fiscal visibility measurements and comparisons. It also advances systematic estimates on visibility for intermediate subsystems of public revenue and expenditure now in force in these European countries. Policy implications seem straightforward. That is, current values are low in general, and allocation improvements could be obtained by implementing changes and reforms that aim to raise both public revenue and expenditure visibility.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Forty-Seventh International Atlantic Economic Conference, Vienna, Austria, March 16–23, 1999. The author is indebted to the participants of this conference and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. The author is responsible for any errors or shortcomings.