This paper discusses the development of public expenditure in the Netherlands since 1850. Why did public expenditure increase from 14% GDP in 1850, nearly 20% in 1921, 30% GDP in 1950 and over 60% GDP in 1983? Dutch public expenditure has fallen to less than 50% GDP in 2003. Why did this...

“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,...

The relative size of the State in industrialized economies has increased dramatically during the past century giving rise to legitimate fears that such a trend might end up having an adverse impact on growth. This paper explores the relationship between the development of government activities...

We develop a DSGE model of the Colombian economy to assess the effect of tax policy on informal employment and income distribution.The model recreates a small open economy, with persistent income inequality, a substantial degree of informality, and different possibilities of government...

This study assesses the optimal size of government in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It uses the time series data over the period 1961-2013 and is based on a model using the Armey curve. It takes into account the possible effects of composition of public expenditure (wages and salaries,...

The aim of this article is to assess the empirical evidence of the nexus between public expenditure and inflation for the Mediterranean countries during the period 1970-2009, using a time-series approach. After a brief introduction, a concise survey of the economic literature on this issue is...

The standard procedure for analyzing transitional dynamics in non-linear macro models has been to employ linear approximations. This raises the central question of this paper: How reliable is this procedure in evaluating the dynamic adjustments to policy changes or structural shocks? This...

El estudio evalúa los efectos que el gasto público en educación ha tenido sobre la distribución del ingreso en el Perú. Las transferencias desde el presupuesto público son analizados revisando el destino del gasto en educación por estratos socioeconómicos, y su impacto de corto plazo en...

The relative size of the State in industrialized economies has increased dramatically during the past century giving rise to legitimate fears that such a trend might end up having an adverse impact on growth. This paper explores the relationship between the development of government activities...

This paper analyses the optimal choice of fiscal policy in a model where public spending enters the production and utility functions and can be financed using flat rate taxes on consumption and on capital and labor incomes. Within this framework we generalize some previous results in the...