This paper analyzes endogenous fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model where agents care about social status and environmental quality. The quest for a higher status is assimilated to a preference for capital wealth. The government uses income tax to finance infrastructure and environmental...

Starting from the secular fact of an increasing government's share, a retrospective on Adolph Wagner's writings seems worthwhile. A leading German economist of the Bismarck era, he first formulated the famous "law of increasing state activity" for industrializing nations. After analyzing his way...

The study empirically investigates ‘Wagner's law,' the relationship between ‘social progress' and ‘growth of state activity' in an economy, using Bangladesh data from 1976 to 2007 in a bivariate as well as a trivariate framework incorporating ‘population size' as a third variable. The...

This article looks at the relationship between public expenditure and economic growth in the Spanish economy in the period 1850-2000. We start from 2 assumptions: one states that the changes in public expenditure directly affect economic growth; the other reverses the relationship between these...

“Wagner’s Law” is the first model of public expenditure in the history of public finance. The aim of this article is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960-2008. After a brief introduction, an essential survey of the economic literature on this issue is offered,...