Wagner’s Law, Public Employment, and Spanish Regions

Manuel Jaén-García ()

Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik), 2018, vol. 64, issue 3, 179-198

Abstract: Following Peacock and Musgrave’s rediscovery of Wagner’s Law, the latter became a standard tool used in research on the relationship between growth of public spending and the factors by which it is influenced. However, conventional empirical tests are based on a specification error related to Wagner’s definition of the public sector, which he considered in its totality, including public companies. The present article attempts to correct this error and obtain an approximation to the size of the public sector by considering public employment as a whole, both in public administrations and services and in public companies. To this end, panel data for the Spanish autonomous regions are used in addition to data for the overall public sector. The empirical test is performed utilizing cointegration techniques and unit roots in panel data. Similarly, the possibility of structural breaks in the data is taken into consideration and they are estimated using fictitious variables.

Keywords: public employment; gross domestic product; unit root; cointegration; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.3790/aeq.64.3.179 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers (2008 onwards); Pay-per-view access from https://elibrary.duncker-humblot.com/journals/aeq (2008 onwards) and http://www.genios.de (2008 onwards)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dah:aeqaeq:v64_y2018_i3_q3_p179-198

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.duncker-humblot.de/zeitschriften/aeq

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik) is currently edited by Cinzia Alcidi, Christian Dreger and Daniel Gros

More articles in Applied Economics Quarterly (formerly: Konjunkturpolitik) from Duncker & Humblot GmbH, Berlin
Bibliographic data for series maintained by E-Publishing-Team ().