The Size and Composition of Government Spending in Europe and Its Impact on Well-Being

Hessami, Zohal

The Size and Composition of Government Spending in Europe and Its Impact on Well-Being

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper analyses whether large governments in Europe reflect efficient responses to a changing social and economic environment (‘welfare economic view’) as opposed to wasteful spending (‘public choice view’). To this end, the effect of government size on subjective well-being is estimated in a micro dataset covering twelve EU countries from 1990 to 2000. The estimations provide evidence for (i) an inversely U-shaped relationship between public sector size and well-being. (ii) The effect of government size on well-being depends on levels of corruption and decentralization as well as people’s ideological preferences and their position in the income distribution. Finally, (iii) higher levels of well-being could have been achieved by spending more on education and less on social protection.

Keywords: Life satisfaction; well-being; public spending; government size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 H40 H50 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21195/1/MPRA_paper_21195.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Size and Composition of Government Spending in Europe and Its Impact on Well‐Being (2010)
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:pra:mprapa:21195

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().