The Growth of Government Expenditure
In: National Institute economic review: journal of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Volume 108, p. 34-41
ISSN: 1741-3036
There is much debate at present about trends in public expenditure. The recent Green Paper on the longer-term outlook for public spending describes how public expenditure has risen faster than GDP in the past and raises the question whether total public spending need grow at all, in real terms, in future although the growth of GDP is projected at over 2 per cent a year. This article is not intended to offer any normative comment on future policy for government spending. Its purpose is to describe some preliminary results of a study of the growth of government spending and its relationship to GDP in the United Kingdom; it also makes some comparisons, in rather broad terms, of the experience of this country with that of some other countries.