The allocative efficiency of government expenditure: Some comparative tests

This paper examines whether observed government expenditures are consistent with optimising behaviour in Australia, Portugal, Sweden and the U.K. Expenditures are treated as intermediate goods producing desired outputs (e.g. health, education, security) conditional on demographic variables. These outputs are arguments in an objective function, optimised subject to a budget constraint. Optimisation then implies testable homogeneity, symmetry and negativity restrictions on the derived demand functions. These were estimated, using the Deaton-Muellbauer AIDS system, on time series data for four categories of expenditure in each country and the restrictions tested, with both homogeneity and symmetry being accepted for Sweden.