The evolution and convergence of the government expenditure composition in the OECD countries: an analysis of the functional distribution

Ismael Sanz and Francisco J. Velazquez ()

Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The composition of the public expenditure affects the long-run growth rate (Barro, 1990, Devarajan, Swaroop and Zou, 1996). This paper has explored the existence of convergence in the structure of government expenditure by functions in the OECD countries for the period 1970-1998 and the perspectives of this process to persist in the future. The results obtained first through the similarity index and afterwards using the usual convergence indicators (ƒÒ, ƒã and ƒ×), adapted to the analysis of the breakdown of public expenditure, point out to the existence of a distribution approximation. Nevertheless, we have found that the majority of expenditures were near to the steady-state, which differs across countries. This reveals that there are some individual factors that impede the convergence to a single structure in the long run. This could be one of the explanations of the difference observed among economic growth rates in developed countries.

Keywords: convergence; composition of public expenditures; funtions of the government (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 F49 L11 R38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-11-05
Note: Type of Document - Word; prepared on PC; to print on HP;
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0111/0111005.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The evolution and convergence of the government expenditure composition in the OECD countries: an analysis of the functional distribution (2001)
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:wpa:wuwppe:0111005

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).