Journal ArticleDOI
Government and Economic Growth in the Less Developed Countries: An Empirical Study for 1960-1980
TLDR
In this paper, government expenditure, revenue raising, and regulation have been examined in the context of economic growth, and a negative relationship between the share of government consumption expenditure in GDP and the growth of per capita GDP for a cross section of 96 LDCs and developed countries over various time periods between 1961 and 1976.Abstract:
Adam Smith founded modern economics with a powerful argument that free markets are the best route to prosperity and economic growth. His conclusion has been studied and debated by economists ever since, including Nobel Prize winners Friedman, Hayek, Kuznets, Lewis, Myrdal, and Schultz. Whatever economists have concluded, since World War II the majority of the less developed countries seem to have opted for extensive government regulation of the private sector and for a large public sector. Has the large government role slowed or accelerated the growth of LDCs? Obviously, this is an important issue. This study looks at government expenditure, revenue raising, and regulation. Greater emphasis is put on expenditure because (1) the revenue raised is presumably a function of the level of expenditure, and (2) there are few internationally comparable measures of regulation. There are virtually no empirical studies of the general impact of government on economic growth. An extensive literature search turned up only three papers. Gemmell analyzed the impact of nonmarket sector growth on various measures of macroeconomic performance for 27 LDCs and developed countries for 1960 and 1970. He drew no general conclusions about the relation between the size of the nonmarket sector and economic growth.' Marsden found a negative relation between tax/GDP ratios and economic growth for a cross section of 20 LDCs and developed countries for the 1970-79 period.2 I found a negative relationship between the share of government consumption expenditure in GDP and the growth of per capita GDP for a cross section of 96 LDCs and developed countries over various time periods between 1961 and 1976.3 This paper extends the approach used in my 1983 article.read more
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Book ChapterDOI
Political Regimes and Economic Growth
Adam Przeworski,Fernando Limongi +1 more
TL;DR: The main mechanism by which democracy is thought to hinder growth is pressure for immediate consumption, which reduces investment, and only states that are institutionally insulated from such pressures can resist them, and democratic states are not as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making Services Work for Poor People
TL;DR: The authors examines the experience with alternative mechanisms for service delivery, contracting out to the private and NGO sectors, community participation, co-financing by service beneficiaries and shows that this, as well as the experience of more traditional public sector provision, can be interpreted by looking at three principal-agent relationships in the service-delivery chain: between policymakers and providers, between clients and providers; and between clients (as citizens) and policymakers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Local Capture: Evidence from a Central Government Transfer Program in Uganda
Ritva Reinikka,Jakob Svensson +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end-user (schools) using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools, and find that schools in better-off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements.
Posted Content
Government Size and Economic Growth: A New Framework and Some Evidence from Cross-Section and Time-Series Data
TL;DR: The impact of government size on economic performance and growth is discussed in this article, where the authors identify some points of view that assign to the government a critical role in the process of economic development, and argue that a larger government size is likely to be a more powerful engine of economic growth.
Posted Content
Government Size and Economic Growth: A New Framework and Some Evidence from Cross-Section and Time-Series Data: Comment
TL;DR: In a recent paper, Rati Ram (1986a) derived an equation for economic growth from two separate production functions, one for the government sector and the other for the nongovernment sector' Three different specifications of the growth equation were estimated using data for 115 countries covering the period 1960-80 as mentioned in this paper.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Government Expenditure and Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Study
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the relationship between the share of government consumption expenditure in GDP and the rate of growth of real per capita GDP using direct price comparisons rather than exchange rate conversions.
Journal Article
The structuralist approach to development policy
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined and compared structuralist methodology and development policy and compared to other major development policy approaches, and concluded that changes in the world economy have complicated the task of development, and most economies are suffering from serious structural disequilibria.
Book
Links between taxes and economic growth: Some empirical evidence
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the mechanisms by which tax policies may have affected the performance of 20 countries and found that those with lower taxes experienced more rapid expansion of investment, productivity, employment, and government services, and had better growth rates.
Journal ArticleDOI
International comparisons of the effects of nonmarket-sector growth
TL;DR: This article examined the implications for macroeconomic performance of differing rates of growth of the non-market sector in different countries and provided a framework within which international comparisons of nonmarket-sector expansion can be made and identified possible consequences of employment growth in both market and nonmarket sectors.