Sizing the Government

Kristof De Witte and Wim Moesen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Is there such a thing as an optimal government size? We investigate by the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) the so-called `Armey curve' which claims an inverted U-shaped relationship between government size and economic performance. The DEA scores are linked to control variables as initial per capita income, openness, population density, urbanization, country size and family size. For 23 OECD-countries we estimate the country specific efficiency scores, which reveal the extent to which a country uses excess public resources to achieve the observed growth rate of GDP.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis; Government size; Public sector performance; Armey-curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H10 H21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-04-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Sizing the government (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:14785

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