Further Evidence on Public Spending and Economic Growth in East Asian Countries

This article examines Wagner’s Law for East Asian countries (China, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) for the period 1960 to 2007. Using the Gregory and Hansen (1996a & b) structural break techniques, we find a cointegrating relationship between real government spending and real income. Our preferred Gregory and Hansen models are with the level shift for Hong Kong and Taiwan and regime shift (change in intercept and slope coefficients) for China, Japan and South Korea. The income elasticity of government spending ranges from 0.756 to 1.155. With these findings, we infer that Wagner’s Law does hold for these countries, except for Hong Kong where the income elasticity is not highly statistically significant.