Download or read book Measuring Government in the Twenty First Century written by Livio Di Matteo and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Government is the single most pervasive institution of modern life, with all facets affected by public sector activities. Over the last 100 years, government spending around the world has grown in terms of both spending percapita and share of national output. During the twentieth century, the relative size of government grew steadily, with surges during the two world wars. Figure 1.1 shows general government expenditure as a share of national output for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom from 1948 to 2011. In 1870, government spending to GDP ratios in these countries were well below 10 percent (Tanzi, 2011: 8), but those ratios had more than tripled by the end of the twentieth century and have continued to grow in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Measuring government in the 21st century An international overview of the size and efficiency of public spending written by Matteo and published by . This book was released on with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Efficiency of Public Spending in Developing Countries written by Santiago Herrera and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2005 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Government spending in developing countries typically account for between 15 and 30 percent of GDP. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on GDP and on the attainment of the government ' s objectives. The first challenge that stakeholders face is measuring efficiency. This paper attempts such quantification and has two major parts. The first part estimates efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier (defined as the maximum attainable output for a given level of inputs). This frontier is estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Both input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 140 countries using data from 1996 to 2002. The second part of the paper seeks to verify empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency. Results show that countries with higher expenditure levels register lower efficiency scores, as well as countries where the wage bill is a larger share of the government ' s budget. Similarly, countries with higher ratios of public to private financing of the service provision score lower efficiency, as do countries plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and those with higher income inequality. Countries with higher aid-dependency ratios also tend to score lower in efficiency, probably due to the volatility of this type of funding that impedes medium term planning and budgeting. Though no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar educational and health outcomes.
Download or read book Quality of Government and Living Standards written by Francesco Grigoli and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 21 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is generally acknowledged that the government’s output is difficult to define and its value is hard to measure. The practical solution, adopted by national accounts systems, is to equate output to input costs. However, several studies estimate significant inefficiencies in government activities (i.e., same output could be achieved with less inputs), implying that inputs are not a good approximation for outputs. If taken seriously, the next logical step is to purge from GDP the fraction of government inputs that is wasted. As differences in the quality of the public sector have a direct impact on citizens’ effective consumption of public and private goods and services, we must take them into account when computing a measure of living standards. We illustrate such a correction computing corrected per capita GDPs on the basis of two studies that estimate efficiency scores for several dimensions of government activities. We show that the correction could be significant, and rankings of living standards could be re-ordered as a result.
Download or read book Return to Growth Volume One written by Jon Moynihan and published by Biteback Publishing. This book was released on 2024-09-10 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The UK has, in recent years, been suffering from what is nothing short of an economic crisis. Growth has now completely stalled in those western democracies, the UK included, where high government spending and high taxes have steadily burgeoned, decade after decade. Free-market economies now threaten to leave us behind in terms of wealth, opportunity and standards of living. At the end of Rishi Sunak's 2024 government, expenditure was at 45 per cent of GDP and taxes were 36 per cent and rising – yet still nowhere near sufficient to cover public expenditure. The government's net annual borrowing is now a completely unsustainable 4.4 per cent of GDP, with our overall national debt growing rapidly and alarmingly. In this arresting and powerful manifesto for economic change, Jon Moynihan analyses the UK's decades-long stagnant economy and looks at what can be done to resuscitate it. Combining rigorous research with unparalleled business experience, he explores the key dynamics affecting economic growth, ranging from government borrowing, expenditure, tax and regulation to the way national resources are deployed on non-productive and futile, growth-stifling endeavours. Ultimately, Moynihan shows that unless we act now to reverse the decline, by radically restructuring our economy to stimulate economic growth, the UK risks stagnation, financial collapse and a long-term disintegration in our standard of living. Ignore his warning at your peril.
Download or read book Public Spending in the 20th Century written by Vito Tanzi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a detailed account of reform experiences in several countries and the public debate regarding government reform, the study closes with an outlook on the future role of the state, a period when globalization may require and people may want "leaner" but not "meaner" states."--Jacket.
Download or read book Why Governments Grow written by Charles Lewis Taylor and published by SAGE Publications, Incorporated. This book was released on 1983-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is unlikely to be agreement about why government grows (much less whether or not this is beneficial) until there is some clearer notion of what is to be measured. Public revenues and expenditures are surely not sufficient to reflect the scope of the public sector, but what should be included? A distinguished international group of scholars consider the number of people employed, the extent of services performed, the quantity of laws enacted, and the degree of regulation enforced. @3`...the book marks a significant step forward for a body of research that has typically been more concerned with normative and theoretical issues.' -- Journal of Policy Analysis & Management, Summer 1984 @3`This scho
Download or read book Public Spending and the Role of the State written by Ludger Schuknecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given high government spending, debt and the new challenges on the horizon, the themes of this work are more relevant than ever: the essential tool of spending by the state, its 'value for money', likely risks in the future, and the remedies to create lean, efficient and sustainable government. This book takes a holistic and international approach, covering most advanced countries, and discusses a historical overview of public expenditure, from the nineteenth century to the modern day, as well as future challenges. It sees the government's role as providing sound rules of the game and essential public goods and services. In presenting the relevant arguments, information and policy recommendations through comprehensive tables, charts and historical facts, the book addresses a broad readership, including students, professionals and interested members of the public.
Download or read book Small is Powerful written by Adam Lent and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity started small. Where did we get the idea big is better? The establishment promote big business, big government or big culture, more often than not, all three. In Small is Powerful Adam Lent reveals how our faith in big was manufactured in the 1900s – by a group of powerful business leaders, politicians and thinkers –and gripped the collective imagination throughout the twentieth century. But the notion that vast concentrations of power should reside in the state, in corporations, or the church has failed to create a stable, fairer world. In Small is Powerful, Lent challenges this failure of imagination and asks us to consider a world where ownership, power and resources are dispersed on a smaller scale, in way that is better for everyone. He explores the roots of the 'small revolution' in the 1970s, and demonstrates how, contrary to received wisdom, this movement is intensifying today. Millions are setting up their own small businesses; political and social change is increasingly delivered by grassroots initiatives; and people are making their own decisions about how to live their lives. Small is Powerful delivers an informed and impassioned plea to stand up and fight for the fairer, wealthier and more stable world we want. It is an impassioned plea for 'smallists' everywhere to stand up and be counted.
Download or read book Efficiency of Public Spending in Developing Countries written by Santiago Herrera and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Government spending in developing countries typically account for between 15 and 30 percent of GDP. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on GDP and on the attainment of the government`s objectives. The first challenge that stakeholders face is measuring efficiency. This paper attempts such quantification and has two major parts. The first part estimates efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier (defined as the maximum attainable output for a given level of inputs). This frontier is estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Both input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 140 countries using data from 1996 to 2002. The second part of the paper seeks to verify empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency. Results show that countries with higher expenditure levels register lower efficiency scores, as well as countries where the wage bill is a larger share of the government`s budget. Similarly, countries with higher ratios of public to private financing of the service provision score lower efficiency, as do countries plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and those with higher income inequality. Countries with higher aid-dependency ratios also tend to score lower in efficiency, probably due to the volatility of this type of funding that impedes medium term planning and budgeting. Though no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar educational and health outcomes.
Download or read book Public Expenditure Handbook written by Mr.Ke-young Chu and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1991-09-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook, edited by Ke-young Chu and Richard Hemming, offers guidance to officials formulating public policy recommendations, so that the aggregate level of public spending conforms with the economy's overall resource capacity. The handbook looks at the impact of public spending on the efficiency of resource use and explores the basis for distinguishing between productive and unproductive spending.
Download or read book Democratic and Authoritarian Political Systems in 21st Century World Society written by Anna L. Ahlers and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the radical novelty of modern polities in a functionally differentiated world society. Premodern states were at the apex of a stratified, hierarchical society. They dominated society and all its groups and strata. Modern polities have to be understood through the ecology of relations among different function systems. They have to find and incessantly redefine their place in society. They produce decisions that are collectively binding, but in preparing these decisions experience constraints and knowledge deficiencies that are related to the complexity of a functionally differentiated society. The book concentrates on six analytical perspectives that reflect how modern polities are embedded into 21st century society. These perspectives are: the concept of inclusion and the inclusion revolution constitutive of modern polities; the internal differentiation of polities that endows them with an unprecedented complexity; the fact that polities do not know anything about society and the ways in which they compensate for this; representation and responsiveness as strategies to reconnect with society; the self-restriction of some polities that brings about ever new autonomous expert organizations; the symmetrical rise of autocracies and democracies as the two modern variants of political regimes.
Download or read book Efficiency of Public Spending in Developing Countries written by Santiago Herrera and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Government spending in developing countries typically account for between 15 and 30 percent of GDP. Hence, small changes in the efficiency of public spending could have a major impact on GDP and on the attainment of the government's objectives. The first challenge that stakeholders face is measuring efficiency. This paper attempts such quantification and has two major parts. The first part estimates efficiency as the distance between observed input-output combinations and an efficiency frontier (defined as the maximum attainable output for a given level of inputs). This frontier is estimated for several health and education output indicators by means of the Free Disposable Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques. Both input-inefficiency (excess input consumption to achieve a level of output) and output-inefficiency (output shortfall for a given level of inputs) are scored in a sample of 140 countries using data from 1996 to 2002. The second part of the paper seeks to verify empirical regularities of the cross-country variation in efficiency. Results show that countries with higher expenditure levels register lower efficiency scores, as well as countries where the wage bill is a larger share of the government's budget. Similarly, countries with higher ratios of public to private financing of the service provision score lower efficiency, as do countries plagued by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and those with higher income inequality. Countries with higher aid-dependency ratios also tend to score lower in efficiency, probably due to the volatility of this type of funding that impedes medium term planning and budgeting. Though no causality may be inferred from this exercise, it points at different factors to understand why some countries might need more resources than others to achieve similar educational and health outcomes.
Download or read book The Evolution and Determinants of Wealth Inequality in the North Atlantic Anglo Sphere 1668 2013 written by Livio Di Matteo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on wealth inequality trends in the North Atlantic Anglo-sphere countries of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the period from 1668 to 2013: a wider perspective than generally used when wealth inequality is discussed. This book demonstrates that it is important to put current dimensions of wealth inequality into historical context by looking at performance over the long run rather than simply a few decades. Moreover, this contribution compiles a substantial amount of data on estimates of wealth inequality and provides a concise overview of trends as well as the drivers of inequality over the long term. It serves as a short supplementary text for economics and sociology courses on economic inequality, economic history and social change—while remaining of interest to scholars and policymakers invested in equality debates of the past and present.
Download or read book Public Expenditure and Growth written by Santiago Herrera and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given that public spending will have a positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring costs and benefits of public spending. The paper discusses one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy debates, namely, the volatility derived from additional public spending. The paper identifies a relationship between public spending volatility and consumption volatility, which implies a direct welfare loss to society. This loss is substantial in developing countries, estimated at 8 percent of consumption. If welfare losses due to volatility are this sizeable, then measuring the benefits of public spending is critical. Gauging benefits based on macro aggregate data requires three caveats: a) considering of the impact of the funding (taxation) required for the additional public spending; b) differentiating between investment and capital formation; c) allowing for heterogeneous response of output to different types of capital and differences in network development. It is essential to go beyond country-specificity to project-level evaluation of the benefits and costs of public projects. From the micro viewpoint, the rate of return of a project must exceed the marginal cost of public funds, determined by tax levels and structure. Credible evaluations require microeconomic evidence and careful specification of counterfactuals. On this, the impact evaluation literature and methods play a critical role. From individual project evaluation, the analyst must contemplate the general equilibrium impacts. In general, the paper advocates for project evaluation as a central piece of any development platform. By increasing the efficiency of public spending, the government can permanently increase the rate of productivity growth and, hence, affect the growth rate of GDP.
Download or read book The Impact of Ethnic Heterogeneity on the Quantity and Quality of Public Spending written by Louis Kuijs and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000-03 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empirical research into the impact of heterogeneity on government output has focussed mainly on its impact on policy choices. As regards the provision of public goods, research has focussed on the impact of heterogeneity on the amount of spending. This paper investigates empirically the impact of heterogeneity on both the amount and quality (technical efficiency) of government spending on health and education, whereby the efficiency of spending is assessed with reference to social indicators. The paper tests the Alesina and Spolaore (1995) model that more heterogeneous societies spend less on pure public goods using a cross-country database and concentrating on health and education. It finds that the results found by Alesina, Baqir, and Easterly (1997) (hereafter referred to as ABE) in an application of that model to a sample of U.S. regions and cities-more heterogeneous societies spend less on pure public goods-can be replicated in a crosscountry study for the health sector, but not for the education sector. At the same time, in line with previous studies on the link between spending and social indicators (Flug, Spilimbergo, and Wachtenheim, 1998; and Filmer, Hammer, and Pritchett, 1998), the paper shows it is difficult to find empirical evidence of an impact of public spending on education and health on social indicators. On the other hand, it finds that heterogeneity strongly affects the efficiency of public expenditure outcomes for both health and education. Heterogeneity is associated with worse health and education indicators, controlling for government expenditure on health and education, and other relevant variables.
Download or read book Government Size and Economic Growth written by Richard K. Vedder and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
