This paper brings together the literatures on the political economy of public expenditures and the determinants of economic growth. Based on a new dataset of rural public expenditures in a panel of Latin American economies, the econometric evidence suggests that non-social subsidies reduce...

This paper identifies a key feature of the structure of government spending as a determinant of economic growth: the public goods/ private goods expenditure ratio, where public goods are broadly defined as expenditures that mitigate market failure. The paper develops a theoretical and empirical...