Title: Downsizing Government: Size and Institutionalist Principles
Abstract:Let us begin by taking the debate about government at face value. The term downsizing surely suggests that the U.S. government is either too big now or getting bigger at a faster rate than is necessar...Let us begin by taking the debate about government at face value. The term downsizing surely suggests that the U.S. government is either too big now or getting bigger at a faster rate than is necessary, is bigger by some meaningful standard than is true of the governments of other industrial market-oriented economies, or is growing faster than these other governments. A reasonable approach is to measure government expenditures as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). So our first question is, is the government of the United States either larger or growing faster than the governments of other major industrial market economies? The OECD reported that in 1992 expenditures (including transfer payments) of the general government of the United States (this will include federal, state, and local governments) constituted 35.4 percent of nominal GDP (see Table 1). Among the major OECD countries (Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Canada), only Japan had a smaller government (32.2 percent of GDP). At the other extreme, the general government of Sweden's expenditures constituted 67.3 percent if GDP.Read More
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 1
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