Public Spending in the 20th Century: a Global Perspective.

AuthorBorcherding, Thomas E.
PositionBook Review

By Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht

Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 291. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Nowadays there is a plethora of research reports in journals and edited volumes on why government grows. Most of these reports, including several of my own, competently address the professional scholar or policy analyst well versed in theory and familiar with the data. They tend to concentrate on fairly technical methods of attributing causes and assessing degrees of contributions.

It was not always thus. More than four decades ago, Francis Bator authored a popular fiscal history, The Question of Government Spending (New York: Harper & Row, 1960). Its subtitle, Public Needs and Private Wants, hinted at its normative biases, but it had the virtue of being an easy read for the intelligent lay person because it used a simple theoretical framework to make sense of the well-presented data.

Not much was added to this popular literature in the next three decades, save for a book devoted to the U.S. experience (Edwin S. Mills, The Burden of Government [Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986]) and a few volumes by Europeans (for example, M. S. Levitt and M. A. S. Joyce, The Growth and Efficiency of Public Spending [Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press 1987], and J. A. Lybeck and M. Henrekson, Explaining the Growth of Government [Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988]) that looked at public spending among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Even these general-interest volumes required a knowledge of economics beyond that possessed by the average well-educated lay reader.

Now, however, Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht have directed their analysis and their provocative hypotheses to a general audience, all the while detailing interesting numbers for the most part by comparing the average percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) attributed to government of seventeen wealthy countries--the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and so forth--from the 1870s until today. Their finding that government's share in GDP has quadrupled in that time immediately catches the reader's attention, and they delve sufficiently deep into data of key subperiods to draw some interesting and unusual inferences. Unlike previous analysts, Tanzi and Schuknecht place a great deal of weight on ideological factors in conditioning public choice, but they are wholly aware of the more garden-variety...

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