0000000000985628
AUTHOR
Giuseppe Albanese
showing 2 related works from this author
Co-movement of public spending in the G7
2010
Abstract The size of government in the G7 countries in the last fifty years follows a common pattern (see the left panel of Fig. 1 below): it grows in the first three decades, and then turns flat at the beginning of the nineties, for all countries alike. We highlight this common pattern in a dynamic factor model, and argue that a satisfactory explanation for it would be desirable.
Government Size, the Role of Commitments*
2011
We explore the hypothesis that long-term commitments affect the dynamics of government expenditure. With the aid of a simple median-voter model we interpret the pattern of increasing-then-constant tax rates observed in OECD countries in the second half of the last century: persistence of public expenditure and a lower bound on new interventions will push government size upward, and preferences of the electorate put a halt to this growth at some point. In this view, the fiscal policy variable is seen to consist of only a part of the total expenditure, the rest being predetermined by its past level.