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Purpose -- An attempt to answer two questions: (i) does spending on social-welfare policies constitute a statistically-significant impulse for reducing poverty among various risk groups in the EU countries? And (ii) what is the level of efficiency of social spending when it comes to reducing various problems associated with poverty in the EU member states? Research method -- Two research methods: Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) and extended Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) are used. Results -- It is established that social-welfare policies in most of the EU countries create a sufficient impulse to reduce poverty among elderly people and survivors, families with children and the unemployed. However, the impulse is often not sufficient in the case of people with problems in meeting housing needs, as well as the sick or disabled. What is more, the relative efficiency of social-welfare spending in some of the EU countries is low, which suggest that better outcomes may be achieved not only by increasing the spending, but also by improving the policies among current amount of funds. Surprisingly, the best-performing countries in reducing the poverty by social-welfare policies include, next to Denmark and Finland, also some Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Originality/value/implications/recommendations -- The research extends the knowledge on the efficiency and effectiveness of government activities for the purpose of limiting poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper has aimed to consider how government expenditure contributes to economic growth by focusing on both the level and composition of government spending, in connection to the dynamics of GDP per capita growth. The investigation covers the period from 1997 to 2017. The authors have applied total expenditure approach analyzing interrelationships between government expenditure and economic growth and division approach examining and comparing the distributions of government expenditure in the selected European Union countries. The authors have applied descriptive statistics, the Pearson's correlation, intensity rate of structural changes and Finger-Kreinin indicator. The findings have suggested the following: 1) there is no evidence on the relationship between general government expenditure and economic development in the European Union countries; 2) the countries with a greater proportion of productive spending, such as Cyprus, Greece, Lithuania, Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia have a low GDP per capita indicator. Economically strong countries, such as Denmark, France and Sweden have relatively low level of productive expenditure; 3) economically stronger countries have more stable compositions of government expenditure than economically weaker ones; 4) the countries with a similar real GDP per capita have been characterized by more similar government spending structures. As the economic gap between countries grows, divergence in allocation of government spending increases. The findings of this research could provide important guideline for the managing of government expenditure in the European Union countries. Moreover, it can serve as a guideline to a public budget management in the countries under consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide more reliable estimates of the relationship between government spending and economic growth in the European Union (EU) during the period of 1995-2015.Design/methodology/approach The methodology consisted of several different stages. In the first stage for an assessment of dynamics of government spending and economic growth indicators over two decades, descriptive statistics analysis was employed. Correlation analysis helped to identify the relationships between government expenditures (GEs) and economic growth. In the third stage, for modeling the relationship and the estimation of causality between GE and economic growth, Granger causality testing was applied.Findings The research indicated that eight EU countries have a significant relationship between government spending and economic growth.Research limitations/implications This study has been bounded by general GE and economic growth only. The breakdowns of general GE on the basis of the activities they support have not been considered in this paper, which is the main limitation of the research. Despite the limitation, it might be maintained that the research highlights key relationships in the EU countries.Originality/value These insights might be useful for policy makers. In countries with unidirectional causality running from GE to economic growth, the government can employ expenditure as a factor for growth. The governments should ensure that resources are properly managed and efficiently allocated to accelerate economic growth in the countries with unidirectional causality from GDP to GE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this paper is an attempt to assess the level of convergence of government health spending in the European Union countries. The ever-increasing level of life expectancy, demographic changes, including the aging of society in many European countries and the development of medical technologies are a growing challenge for modern nations. The similarities in the changes taking place in the EU states lead to considering whether there are similar transformations in health spending? Ensuring access to primary healthcare is one of the tasks of the welfare state and it can be assumed to be a public good. Accepting these reasons, the authors set out to investigate the phenomenon of sigma and beta unconditional convergence for the level of government spending on health care in the EU countries. The answer to the question has been sought: does participation in the EU leads to convergence in government spending on health care? The study uses selected dispersion measures for sigma convergence calculations and econometric modelling for beta convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an overview of Public-Private Partnership contracts, focusing on the balance sheet treatment of these contracts, particularly in light of the recently published Eurostat and EPEC guidance on the Statistical Treatment of PPPs. The aim of this additional guidance is to translate the statistical rules into contract provisions and we analyse this in relation to the transfer of risks and rewards, whilst considering the extent of government funding and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing public spending was a major objective when governments across Europe increasingly turned to outsourcing as a mode of public service provision from the 1980s. Today, despite its prevalence, there is still little consensus in the literature on whether outsourcing is an effective policy as regards reducing spending. Using a panel data model for 25 European countries over the period 1990–2011, this article tests whether outsourcing actually led to a reduction in public spending. Results indicate that outsourcing failed to reduce government expenditures at the central government level. This finding persists even after controlling for expenditure dynamics and addressing potential endogeneity issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays security is one of the most important things and a hot issue among politicians. The European countries are surrounded by threats and have to be prepared to face instability. For every country it is necessary to ensure internal as well as external security. That is why many policy-makers have to decide how much money should be spent on security. This paper investigates the tendencies of defence expenditure and its structural changes in the European Union countries in the period of year between 2004 and 2012. Firstly, based on the defence expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the European Union (EU) countries have been classified into four categories, such as high defence spenders, upper middle defence spenders, lower middle and low defence spenders. Secondly, the structural analysis of defence expenditure has been applied in the context of the EU countries' groups. To that end, the findings suggest the following: 1) over the period of 2004-2012, spending for military defence has dominated in the structure of total defence expenditure of the EU countries; 2) increase in foreign military aid and R&D defence promote growth of the defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP, while the drop in military and civil defence as well as defence n.e.c. impact on decline of total defence expenditure; 3) high defence spenders report increase in the share for military defence, while other groups of the EU countries show decline of this spending; the increase of the share for foreign military aid has been typical for all the EU countries' groups; 4) high defence spenders have the most significant intensity coefficient of structural changes, while upper middle and low defence spenders' groups have the least changing defence's patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of government expenditure management has increased during the last years. This paper provides empirical evidence on the cyclicality and the relationship between government expenditure and output in five European Union members in a period 1995-2009. We use Johansen cointegration test and the error correction model and analyze annual data on government expenditure in compliance with the COFOG international standard. The results confirm that the government expenditure functions are procyclical in most countries (91% cases in the sample). Output and government expenditure are cointegrated at least for four from ten expenditure functions in every country (four in the Czech Republic and Hungary, five in Bulgaria, seven in Slovakia and eight in Romania) and it implies a long-term relationship between government expenditure and output. Average value of long-run elasticity coefficients is 1.72 for all expenditure functions, 1.16 for total government expenditure. Conclusions about the short-run relationship between expenditure and output are not unambiguous due to a relatively low statistical significance. However, the coefficient values (average is 3.14) confirm the voracity hypothesis, as they suggest that in response to a given shock to real GDP, government expenditure will rise by even more in percentage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effects of redistribution policy on economic growth by analyzing government expenditure on the welfare state in the old and new post-socialist European Union (EU) countries covering periods of mid-1990 to 2008. It examines the correlation between mean values of welfare state expenditure and gross domestic product(GDP) growth rate of EU countries. It also looks at the effect of government budget constraint on such with both expenditure and taxes analysed.

EU member countries are currently exposed to negative implications of the economic and financial crisis. In connection with this problem arises the question of an anti-cyclic role of an economic policy or more precisely the (regulatory) role of the government in the economy that seems to be the centre of discussions in the academic as well as economic policy sphere. The problem of a permanent deficiency of the general government budget stresses many "old" as well as "new" EU member countries. It significantly reduces an expansionary potential of the national fiscal policies. Because the economic crisis seems to be a very difficult problem due to its specific and complex features, it is necessary for the EU member countries to coordinate the process of the national stimulatory actions approving that would help the countries to avoid an undesired reallocation of resources outside the EU single market as well as the negative common competitive effects. In the paper we analyze the effects of fiscal policy shocks in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak republic, Bulgaria and Romania in the period 2000-2008. Our objective is to estimate the effects of discretionary changes in fiscal policy (associated with an increase in government expenditures) as well as the role of automatic stabilizers (associated with an increase in tax revenues). To meet the objective we estimate vector autoregression (VAR) model. To check the robustness of the results we implement an identification scheme based on two approaches. The first, recursive approach, is based on the Cholesky decomposition of innovations that allows us to identify structural shocks hitting the model. The second approach, structural VAR approach, is based on applying long-run restrictions to the reduced-form VAR model. From both identified true models we compute impulse-response functions to estimate the responses of real output, inflation and short term interest rates to the government expenditure and tax revenue shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]