This paper analyses the effects in terms of size and volatility of government revenue and spending on growth in OECD and EU countries. The results of the paper suggest that both variables are detrimental to growth. In particular, looking more closely at the effect of each component of government...

Does economic freedom increase the utility of an average citizen? Public choice theory in particular has emphasized the shortcomings of governments and voting processes, and the advantages of relying on markets and individual decision making. However, an increasing amount of people are refusing...

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied. An alternative approach - of limiting the focus to studies of the...

In a recent paper, Colombier (2009) uses a robust estimation technique and claims to find empirical evidence that government size has not been detrimental to growth for OECD countries during the 1970 to 2001 period, and that endogenous growth theory is not corroborated. We examine the robustness...

This paper re-examines the relationship between government size and output volatility from two perspectives. First, we use a wider international data set of 91 countries over the period 1980-1999 and thus not only the OECD data that have thus far been utilized. Second, we also allow for time...

We argue that the literature on government size suffers from neglecting the role of governance both as a driving and a limiting factor for government spending. Cross-country evidence for a sample of 126 developed and developing countries averaging data for the period 2003-07 reveals that better...

Central banks in developing countries, wanting to devalue the domestic currency, usually intervene in the foreign exchange market by buying up foreign currency using domestic money-often backing this up with sterilization to counter inflationary pressures. Such interventions are usually...