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Government Expenditure (government + expenditure)
Selected AbstractsPRODUCTIVE GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTHJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 4 2009Andreas Irmen Abstract We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. We show that an understanding of the core results and the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study of their respective Euler equations. We argue that the existing literature incorporates many relevant aspects; however, policy recommendations tend to hinge on several knife-edge assumptions. Therefore, future research ought to focus more on idea-based endogenous growth models to check the robustness of policy recommendations. Moreover, the inclusion of hitherto unexplored types of government expenditure, e.g. on the ,rule of law', would be desirable. [source] THE OPTIMAL DIVISION OF GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE BETWEEN PUBLIC GOODS AND TRANSFER PAYMENTSAUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 2 2010JOHN CREEDY This paper examines the optimal ratio of transfer payments to expenditure on public goods, for a given income tax rate. The transfer payment is then determined by the government's budget constraint. The optimal ratio of transfers to public good expenditure per person is expressed as a function of the ratio of the median to the arithmetic mean wage, and of the tax rate. Reductions in the skewness of the wage rate distribution are associated with reductions in transfer payments relative to public goods expenditure, at a decreasing rate. Furthermore, increases in the tax rate, from relatively low levels, are associated with increases in the relative importance of transfer payments. But beyond a certain level, further tax rate increases are associated with a lower ratio of transfers to public goods, because of adverse incentive effects. [source] Output Taxation, Human Capital and GrowthTHE MANCHESTER SCHOOL, Issue 2 2000Rosa Capolupo In this paper we investigate the long-run effects of government spending and taxation in an endogenous growth setting. The model is a variant of Barro's model (,Government Expenditure in a Simple Model of Endogenous Growth', Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 98, 1990, pp. S103,S125) and Lucas's model (,On the Mechanics of Economic Development', Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 22, 1988, pp. 3,42) in which human capital accumulation is driven by government spending on public education. To balance the budget the government levies a tax on output in two alternative specifications of the human capital accumulation equation. The results consolidate some recent findings that taxation, when it is used for productive purposes, may lead to faster growth. Growth rates increase with taxes up to a level around 60,70 per cent. [source] Intergenerational Allocation of Government Expenditures: Externalities and Optimal TaxationJOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 1 2008KAZI IQBAL This paper studies optimal capital and labor income taxes when the benefits of public goods are age-dependent. Provided the government can impose a consumption tax, it can attain the first-best resource allocation. This involves the uniform taxation of the cohorts' labor income and a zero capital income tax. With no consumption tax and optimally chosen government spending, labor income should be taxed nonuniformly across cohorts and the capital income tax should be nonzero. Deviations of the public goods from their respective optima create distortions. These affect the labor supply decisions of both cohorts and capital accumulation, providing a further reason to tax (or subsidize) capital income. [source] FISCAL READJUSTMENTS IN THE UNITED STATES: A NONLINEAR TIME-SERIES ANALYSISECONOMIC INQUIRY, Issue 1 2009ANDREA CIPOLLINI We analyze the fiscal adjustment process in the United States using a multivariate threshold vector error regression model. The shift from single-equation to multivariate setting adds value both in terms of our economic understanding of the fiscal adjustment process and the forecasting performance of nonlinear models. We find evidence that fiscal authorities intervene to reduce real per capita deficit only when it reaches a certain threshold and that fiscal adjustment takes place primarily by cutting government expenditure. The results of out-of-sample density forecast and probability forecasts suggest that a shift from a univariate autoregressive model to a multivariate model improves forecast performance. (JEL C32, C53, E62) [source] Results of the first survey of independent trust grantmaking: who is setting the agenda?INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NONPROFIT & VOLUNTARY SECTOR MARKETING, Issue 3 2000Cathy Pharoah Based on an analysis of 2,300 grants made by a representative sample of independent trusts and foundations, ,Patterns of Independent Grantmaking in the UK' is the first national survey identifying where independent trusts allocate their funds. The results show that, as in mainstream central and local government expenditure, social care was a clear priority for independent grantmakers, not only attracting the highest proportion of grants overall, but also the single largest proportion of funding, £233m. This figure equals just over one-third of local authority support for social services in the voluntary sector and indicates that the collective impact of independent funding to the sector is significant. Social care funding consisted mainly of a large number of small to medium-sized grants. Health was the second largest area, followed by education and the arts. There was a considerable regional imbalance in funding. Given this fairly conservative pattern of funding, the question arises whether funders are led by applicants or vice versa? What is needed to introduce more change and risk into trust funding? Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications. [source] PRODUCTIVE GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURE AND ECONOMIC GROWTHJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 4 2009Andreas Irmen Abstract We provide a comprehensive survey of the recent literature on the link between productive government expenditure and economic growth. We show that an understanding of the core results and the ensuing contributions can be gained from the study of their respective Euler equations. We argue that the existing literature incorporates many relevant aspects; however, policy recommendations tend to hinge on several knife-edge assumptions. Therefore, future research ought to focus more on idea-based endogenous growth models to check the robustness of policy recommendations. Moreover, the inclusion of hitherto unexplored types of government expenditure, e.g. on the ,rule of law', would be desirable. [source] Incentives and the Efficiency of Public Sector-outsourcing ContractsJOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS, Issue 5 2005Paul H. Jensen Abstract., Outsourcing the provision of traditionally publicly provided services has become commonplace in most industrialized nations. Despite its prevalence, there still is no consensus in the academic literature on the magnitude (and determinants) of expected cost savings to the government, nor the sources of those savings. This article considers the arguments for (and against) outsourcing and then examines the empirical evidence pertaining to whether any observed savings occur and whether they persist over time. In addition, we examine the existing evidence for the ,redistribution hypothesis' and the ,quality-shading hypothesis', which critics have used to argue that outsourcing lowers government expenditure by lowering wages and conditions and/or lower quality services. Finally, we consider the impact of contract design on outsourcing outcomes. While the power of incentives is a strong theme in economics, recent work has suggested that high-powered incentives may be suboptimal for many public sector services, because they may crowd out intrinsic motivation, particularly in instances where agents are highly motivated. We discuss the implications of this insight for the efficiency of public sector outsourcing. [source] Environmental Impacts of Products: A Detailed Review of StudiesJOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 3 2006Arnold Tukker Summary Environmental effects of economic activities are ultimately driven by consumption, via impacts of the production, use, and waste management phases of products and services ultimately consumed. Integrated product policy (IPP) addressing the life-cycle impacts of products forms an innovative new generation of environmental policy. Yet this policy requires insight into the final consumption expenditures and related products that have the greatest life-cycle environmental impacts. This review article brings together the conclusions of 11 studies that analyze the life-cycle impacts of total societal consumption and the relative importance of different final consumption categories. This review addresses in general studies that were included in the project Environmental Impacts of Products (EIPRO) of the European Union (EU), which form the basis of this special issue. Unlike most studies done in the past 25 years on similar topics, the studies reviewed here covered a broad set of environmental impacts beyond just energy use or carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The studies differed greatly in basic approach (extrapolating LCA data to impacts of consumption categories versus approaches based on environmentally extended input-output (EEIO) tables), geographical region, disaggregation of final demand, data inventory used, and method of impact assessment. Nevertheless, across all studies a limited number of priorities emerged. The three main priorities, housing, transport, and food, are responsible for 70% of the environmental impacts in most categories, although covering only 55% of the final expenditure in the 25 countries that currently make up the EU. At a more detailed level, priorities are car and most probably air travel within transport, meat and dairy within food, and building structures, heating, and (electrical) energy-using products within housing. Expenditures on clothing, communication, health care, and education are considerably less important. Given the very different approaches followed in each of the sources reviewed, this result hence must be regarded as extremely robust. Recommendations are given to harmonize and improve the methodological approaches of such analyses, for instance, with regard to modeling of imports, inclusion of capital goods, and making an explicit distinction between household and government expenditure. [source] Does Allocation of Public Spending Matter in Poverty Reduction?ASIAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 4 2008Evidence from Thailand H41; H53; H54 The present paper uses a panel dataset to estimate the marginal returns to different types of government expenditure on agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction in Thailand. The study finds that additional government spending on agricultural research provides the largest return in terms of agricultural productivity and has the second largest impact on rural poverty reduction. Increased investment in rural electrification has the largest poverty reduction impact, mainly through improved nonfarm employment. Rural education has the third largest impact on both productivity and poverty reduction. Irrigation has a positive impact on agricultural productivity, but regional variation is considerable. Government spending on rural roads has no significant impact on agricultural productivity and its poverty reduction impact ranks last among all investment alternatives considered. Additional investment in the Northeast Region has a greater impact on poverty reduction than in other regions. [source] Testing the endogenous growth model: public expenditure, taxation, and growth over the long runCANADIAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2001Michael Bleaney Endogenous growth models, such as Barro (1990), predict that government expenditure and taxation will have both temporary and permanent effects on growth. We test this prediction using panels of annual and period-averaged data for OECD countries during 1970,95, isolating long-run from short-run fiscal effects. Our results strongly support the endogenous growth model and suggest that long-run fiscal effects are not fully captured by period averaging and static panel methods. Unlike previous investigations, our estimates are free from biases associated with incomplete specification of the government budget constraint and do not appear to result from endogeneity of fiscal or investment variables. JEL Classification: H30, O40 Validation du modèle de croissance endogène: dépenses publiques, fiscalité et croissance à long terme. Des modèles de croissance endogène comme celui de Barro (1990) prédisent que dépenses gouvernementales et fiscalité vont avoir des effets temporaires et permanents sur la croissance. On met cette prévision au test à l'aide de données annuelles et pour certaines moyennes couvrant des sous-périodes pour les pays de l'OCDE (1970,95) dans le but de départager les effets à court et à long terme. Les résultats valident fortement le modèle de croissance endogène et suggèrent que les effets fiscaux à long terme ne sont pas pleinement capturés par des méthodes utilisant des moyennes ou des méthodes statiques. Contrairement aux résultats d'enquêtes antérieures, les résultats proposés ne souffrent pas de distorsions attribuables à une spécification incomplète de la contrainte budgétaire du gouvernement, et ne semblent pas être l'effet d'écho de l'endogénéité des variables fiscales et de l'investissement. [source] The National Bowel Cancer Audit: the risks and benefits of moving to open reporting of clinical outcomesCOLORECTAL DISEASE, Issue 8 2010M. R. Thompson Abstract Background, The government's proposals to openly report clinical outcomes poses challenges to the National Bowel Cancer Audit now funded by the UK department of health. Aim, To identify the benefits and risks of open reporting and to propose ways the risks might be minimized. Methods, A review of the literature on clinical audit and the consequences of open reporting. Results, There are significant potential benefits of a national audit of bowel cancer including protecting patients from sub-standard care, providing clinicians with externally validated evidence of their performance, outcome data for clinical governance and evidence that increases in government expenditure are achieving improvements in survival from bowel cancer. These benefits will only be achieved if the audit captures most of the cases of bowel cancer in the UK, the data collected is complete and accurate, the results are risk adjusted and these are presented to the public in a way that is fair, clear and understandable. Involvement of clinicians who have confidence in the results of the audit and who actively compare their own results against a national standard is essential. It is suggested that a staged move to open reporting should minimise the risk of falsely identifying an outlying unit. Conclusion, The fundamental aim of the National Bowel Cancer Audit is the pursuit of excellence by identification and adoption of best practice. This could achieve a continuous improvement in the care of all patients with bowel cancer in the UK. The ACPGBI suggests a safer way of transition to open reporting to avoid at least some of its pitfalls. [source] THE ECONOMICS OF HOMELAND SECURITY EXPENDITURES: FOUNDATIONAL EXPECTED COST-EFFECTIVENESS APPROACHESCONTEMPORARY ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 1 2007SCOTT FARROW While most economists expect some marginal conditions to result from basic expected value models involving government expenditures and homeland security investments, such models are not readily found in the literature. The article presents six basic models that all incorporate uncertainty; they also capture various problems involving technological limits, behavioral interactions, false negatives and false positives, and decision making with uncertainty and irreversibility. Recent reviews of homeland security programs by the U.S. Government Accountability Office are used to illustrate the relevance of the models.(JEL H100) [source] Trade Liberalization and the Fiscal Squeeze: Implications for Public InvestmentDEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2003Barsha Khattry This article examines the impact of trade liberalization on the level and structure of government expenditures across countries, with particular emphasis on low income countries. It develops the argument that the policies employed during trade liberalization have resulted in a fiscal squeeze as a result of declining tax revenues and rising interest expenditures. To surmount this fiscal hurdle, expenditures on physical capital, which have negligible political ramifications, have been reduced. Other more politically sensitive expenditures, such as spending on social capital, have been financed by incurring additional debt. However, additional debt has exerted upward pressure on interest payments, further exacerbating the fiscal situation. The statistical analysis carried out to examine the evidence uses panel data for eighty developing and industrialized countries over the period 1970,98 and employs a fixed,effects regression framework to account for country,specific characteristics. The results indicate that trade liberalization has indeed resulted in declining revenues and higher interest expenditures and that these factors have contributed to the observed decline in infrastructure spending. [source] Some Lessons from Transaction-Cost Politics for Less-Developed CountriesECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2003Avinash Dixit Transaction-cost politics views economic policy-making as a political process constrained by asymmetric information and limited commitment possibilities. This paper examines some implications of this perspective for less-developed countries (LDCs) considering policy reform. It emphasizes that success requires reform of the rules and institutions which govern the strategic interaction of the participants in the political game, and that reforms must cope with the special interests and asymmetric information which already exist. In this light, it examines some broad issues of the design of constitutions and institutions (definition and enforcement of property rights, control of inflation, and of government expenditures, federalism, and redistribution), as well as some specific issue of the design of organizations and incentives (problems posed by the interaction of multiple tasks and multiple interests, and their interaction with the limitations on auditing and administration that exists in many LDCs). [source] Expenditure Incidence in Africa: Microeconomic EvidenceFISCAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2000David E. Sahn Abstract In this paper, we examine the progressivity of social sector expenditures in eight sub-Saharan African countries. We employ dominance tests, complemented by extended Gini/concentration coefficients, to determine whether health and education expenditures redistribute resources to the poor. We find that social services are poorly targeted. Among the services examined, primary education tends to be most progressive and university education is least progressive. The benefits associated with hospital care are also less progressive than other health facilities. Our results also show that, while concentration curves are a useful way to summarise information on the distributional benefits of government expenditures, statistical testing of differences in curves is important. [source] ,Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of WelfareGOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2000Fiona Ross The ,new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the ,new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. ,Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under ,conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the ,new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the ,new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments. [source] Debt Neutrality and the Infinite,Lived Representative ConsumerJOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 4 2002Bertrand Crettez In this paper, we study the intertemporal equilibria of an infinite,lived representative agent model with public debt. We show that for a given path of government expenditures, there generally exists a continuum of equilibria depending on various debt policies. These equilibria are characterized by different paths of consumption and leisure. Two examples illustrate the results: in the first one consumption and leisure may converge to zero, in the second one consumption goes to infinity while leisure goes to its maximum value. In a third example with externalities à la Romer, the standard intertemporal equilibrium with zero public debt may be dominated by other intertemporal equilibria. [source] Electoral behaviour behind the gates: partisanship and political participation among Canadian gated community residentsAREA, Issue 1 2010R. Alan Walks Gated communities have been characterised as representing processes of ,forting up' and ,civic secession', in which their residents use gating as a strategy for withdrawing from political life and from taking collective responsibility for others. The assumption is that the residents of private gated communities should be less likely to participate in political life, and/or be more likely to support political parties on the right who advocate privatisation, reduced government expenditures and lower taxes. If the act of living in a gated community is associated with either greater support for parties and policies on the right of the political spectrum, or limited political participation, then the growth of such forms of privatised communities has potential implications for the future of urban politics and even for national political systems. However, despite surveys that have dealt with social attitudes ,behind the gates', insufficient attention has been paid to the politics of gated community residents. This paper fills this gap through a comparative analysis of electoral behaviour during the 2006 federal election at the level of the polling station. Electoral participation and partisanship in 27 gated communities in three Canadian metropolitan areas is compared against that of non-gated residents. Regression analysis is conducted in order to determine whether gated community residents differ from their non-gated counterparts in the way they vote and their levels of electoral turnout, after controlling for social composition. The potential implications of this research are then discussed. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||