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British data from the early 1700s through World War I reflect the results of numerous high‐quality natural experiments of government spending. Britain frequently participated in wars, increasing military spending massively. Wartime distortions were relatively limited because the government generally adopted tax smoothing policy and rarely implemented interventions. Government spending multiplier estimates are low or negative and significantly below unity. This paper finds no evidence that the multiplier was higher in the slack state than in the normal state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the effect of providing personally tailored budgetary information on public attitudes to tax and spending? We address this question with a survey experiment based on the annual tax summaries introduced by the UK tax authorities in 2014. By subtly manipulating the categories of state spending – in particular, the controversial category of ‘welfare’ – to invoke a sense of unfairness, we show how budget information in general and the United Kingdom’s annual tax summaries in particular impact support for state spending. Though the stated aim of providing personalised tax receipts to income taxpayers is to enhance fiscal transparency, doing so may also damage support for state spending if the information provides a sense that existing redistribution is unfair. The article contributes to political science debates about public attitudes to tax and spending, the character and trade-offs of fiscal transparency, and the framing effects of welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While public support is central to the problem-solving capacity of the European Union, we know little about when and why the EU can increase its citizens' support through spending. Extensive research finds that citizens living in countries that are net beneficiaries of the EU budget are more supportive of the EU, assuming that citizens care equally about all forms of spending. It is argued in this article, however, that the amount of spending is only part of the story. Understanding the effects of spending on support requires a consideration of how transfers are spent. Drawing on policy feedback theories in comparative politics, it is shown that support for the EU is a function of the fit between the spending area and economic need in individuals' immediate living context. Results from a statistical analysis of EU spending on human capital, infrastructure, agriculture, energy and environmental protection in 127 EU regions over the period 2001-2011 corroborate this argument. As the EU and other international organisations become increasingly publicly contested, the organisations themselves may increasingly try to shore up public support through spending, but they will only be successful under specific conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the way AIDS activism, and more largely the homosexual movement, have been progressively supported and funded by the State in France. If the State is most often viewed as a target of protest movements, some research focuses on how state interventions may contribute not only to the development and success of voluntary groups but also constrain their room to maneuver, pushing them to soften their claims, their identities and their repertoires of action. The authors also address a less often explored dimension of the effect of State funding, that is, how, in the case under study, it has contributed to shaping the social and legal forms of same-sex politics and coproduced social norms of contemporary homosexuality. State funding is viewed less as a factor of transformation of movements, in its effects of acting as a brake on or a facilitator of action by mobilized groups, and more in the way it has become involved in a process of coproduction of social norms along with social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have a long history of funding nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their programs. While there is much work describing this funding, there has been little research systematically examining how the political and economic context shapes the level and type of funding NGOs receive. This article examines the factors that predict levels of government funding for NGOs over time, focusing on spending for interest groups in three areas, Indigenous, women, and the environment. We use data collected from the Canadian Public Accounts, which lists all grants to groups by the federal government from 1972 until 2014. We use these data to assess how federal funding has changed over this period, how funding across issue areas is related, and the role of political and economic factors in shaping rising and declining funding over time. We find that the factors that predict funding vary across issue areas. Our analysis also shows government’s tendency to sprinkle funding across a larger number of groups or concentrate it in a smaller number of organizations is strongly related to the party in power and the issue area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Channeling theory posits that external funding for social movements, rather than coopting activism, channels activism into more structured and less militants forms. Studies on channeling, however, focus on private funding. The following article examines whether public funding has a comparable effect on social movements. Using the human rights movement in Canada as a case study, it examines several issues relating to channeling: why funders support activism; funding as social control or altruism; how funding is related to consolidating movement gains; and the impact of funding on mobilization, activism, and internal movement dynamics. To address these questions, this article draws on an innovative new data set that includes lists of grants extracted from more than 30 years of government budgets in Canada. It also draws on several years of archival research on a network of 19 organizations in every region of Canada, as well as interviews with former members of these organizations. In addition to demonstrating that public funding has a comparable channeling effect as private funding, this article provides the first comprehensive survey of the extent of state funding for the human rights movement in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2007-2008 global economic crisis and the recent effects of declining global oil prices has led most countries in sub-Saharan Africa to respond by borrowing massively from both domestic and international market to fund the day to day running of the home country. The effects of borrowing and increased deficit financing raises the age old question of the linkage between government deficits financing, rising domestic interest rates and contracting investment. Notable amongst the issue raised by increasing deficit financing is the issue of government borrowing crowding out private sector investment which manifest in the form of a short fall in private sector’s purchase of government bond below the anticipated raise in government deficit financing resulting in more borrowing on the part of government and less money available for financing private projects. Theories abound in the literature that tried to establish the linkage between budget deficit and interest rate, however, there is no consensus on the relationship between them and on the magnitude of the deficit financing that will ultimately trigger a rise in domestic interest rates. This study, therefore, examines the effect of government deficit financing on interest rates. The study applied panel Vector Auto regression techniques (PVAR) on dataset collected from 18 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) over the period 2000 to 2014. The result obtained analyzing the impulse function (IRF), the variance decomposition (VDC) and the VAR causality show the response of interest rate to rising government fiscal deficits to be slow initially negating the conventional Keynesian proposition which states that rising government deficit reduces the stock of loanable funds and consequently crowds out private sector investment. Subsequently, the result shows interest rate response to government fiscal deficit to be neutral or insensitive. These findings lend credence to the Ricardian Equivalence theory, which emphasizes the neutrality of budget deficit on interest rate. In addition, interest rate responded positively to exchange rate, inflation, and money supply. The empirical evidence suggest that Sub-Saharan African economies need not bother about the effects of rising government borrowing on interest rates provided they stay within the accepted limit of debt sustainability ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859-64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the effects of public policies on religiosity by focusing on the enrolment of pupils in French Catholic primary schools between 1878 and 1902. During this period, the government increased public spending and made school attendance free and mandatory until the age of 13. The empirical analysis presented here suggests that greater public spending had no substantial effect on the enrolment in Catholic schools. By contrast, mandatory schooling laws had a negative, but quantitatively limited, impact. The overall resilience of Catholic schooling is traced to the political divide created by the 1789 French Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from 1950 the extraordinary intervention for the South was the tool with which the Italian government attempted to redress the dual nature of the national economy, the same dichotomy that earlier administrative and economic measures had failed to resolve adequately. The various studies aimed at evaluating the outcome of this policy, which ended at the beginning of the 1990s, usually investigated to which extent the differences between quantitatively measurable indicators of regional imbalance diminished during the period under consideration, mainly leading to the conclusion that the South-North gap was reduced only in terms of GDP per capita, and even there the reduction was insignificant. This paper tries to contribute to an assessment of the extraordinary intervention by adopting a different perspective, examining the role that the economic evaluation of public expenditure played within the political decision-making process of this measure of regional policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on distributive politics suggests that politicians have incentives to engage in targeted spending especially in decentralized political systems with weak parties and candidate-centered elections. We argue that in centralized political systems with party-centered elections parties use intergovernmental transfers to advance their electoral fortune via performance spillovers across different levels of government. On the basis of a new data set on partisan composition of local councils in England and grants allocated by the central government during 1992-2012, and using a difference-in-difference approach, we provide evidence that governments allocate up to 17% more money to local councils controlled by their "own" party. Furthermore, we show that the effect is strongest closer to local election years, in local councils where institutions facilitate credit claiming, and in swing councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the 1960s and 1980s in West Germany the state grew and expanded to an extent unprecedented in the history of the country. This willingness to accept "more state" proved to be a turning point in West German society and had significant consequences, predominantly financial, such as the soaring expansion of public expenditure and the dramatic increase in public debt. A unique combination of stakeholders was required to bring about the expansion of state duties and expenditure. This broad and at the same time highly diverse and wide-ranging "expansion coalition" hoped to solve the problems confronting the Federal Republic in the post-war period. Its formation in the 1960s and subsequent disintegration and partial replacement in the 1970s by an only slightly less heterogeneous "consolidation coalition" can be analysed using the methodical tools of the concept developed as the "Advocacy Coalition Framework". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To estimate the impact of federal spending on state incomes, we develop an annual panel data set between 1930 and 1940. Using panel methods we estimate that an added dollar of federal spending in the state increased state per capita income by between 40 and 96 cents. The point estimates for nonfarm grants are higher and for AAA farm grants are much smaller and negative in some cases. The spending led to increase in durable good spending on automobiles but had no positive effects on private employment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How and why do regime type and interstate war affect government spending? We argue that a political leader allocates scarce resources between social and military expenditures as a function of their relative efficiency in securing her political survival. We derive four hypotheses concerning how mobilization for and demobilization from interstate war affects government spending differently in democratic and autocratic regimes. Compared to democracies, autocracies should increase military spending to a greater degree during wartime and decrease military spending to a greater extent following a war. Autocracies also should cut social spending more during an interstate war and increase social spending more during the process of demobilization from war than democracies. Our analyses of all states in the international system from 1950 to 2001 yield support for our hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Historia Económica / Journal of Iberian & Latin American Economic History is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholars blame high levels of ethnic heterogeneity for many social and political ills, including poor economic growth, corruption, and policy gridlock. But it can be argued that, in seeking reelection, politicians will join multiethnic coalitions to pass policies in this endeavor. Further, government expenditure increases with coalition size, as each politician seeks policies that benefit his or her own constituents. Subnational data from Zambia, the use of which helps control for country-level factors hindering standard cross-national studies of fiscal politics, indicate that government spending increases with ethnic heterogeneity. This evidence challenges studies which ignore the incentives generated by political institutions and claim that ethnicity leads directly to undesirable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nine versions of Wagner's law are examined employing annual time-series data on Bolivia for the period 1940-2010. The analysis is an advance over previous work in several ways. First, the stationarity properties and the order of integration of the data are investigated using the Augmented Dickey-Fuller and the Phillips and Perron tests. Second, the hypothesis of a long-run relationship between different types of government expenditures and income is tested employing the methodology of cointegration analysis. Third, Error Correction Models are utilized to determine the direction of causality between the variables of interest. Lastly, the study comprises a period of seventy years, the longest of its kind for Bolivia. Consistent with Wagner's proposition, bidirectional causality is found between income and government expenditures in six of the nine versions of the law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores the relationship between public expenditure and labor productivity in the manufacturing sector of municipalities in the U.S. between 1880 and 1920. The authors assert that the time period was one of rapid industrialization in larger cities, including high production growth and public infrastructure spending. The authors conclude that public expenditure by local governments had no significant economic impact on the labor productivity during the time period. It is the authors' opinion that efforts by the federal government to increase labor productivity in the 21st century through increased spending on infrastructure projects at local levels will not be effective, and that maintaining a low tax burden at the municipal level would be a more effective economic strategy.

La persistente desigualdad en América Latina parece reflejar la inexistencia de políticas específicas orientadas a disminuir esta brecha. El objetivo del presente trabajo es estimar mediante técnicas econométricas los determinantes de la distribución del ingreso en América Latina, en un contexto en que parecen coexistir' el crecimiento económico y la reducción de las desigualdades, superando el "síndrome del casillero vacío" que caracterizó a la región en las décadas de 1980 y 1990. Con estudios de corte transversal en una muestra de países de la Organización de Cooperación y Desarrollo Económicos (ocde) y de América Latina, y estimaciones de panel para 18 países latinoamericanos respecto del período 1990-2010, se muestra la relevancia de variables educacionales, institucionales y macroeconómicas en las mejoras recientes. Asimismo, se identifica la importancia de la acción fiscal, con variables como el gasto social, el gasto en educación, el gasto en capital y un indicador de progresividad tributaria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on military expenditures incurred by the Spanish empire during the reign of Charles II, the King of Spain, from 1665 to 1700, especially in the Caribbean region. The author explores military expenses incurred in the region, under the administration of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, as well as the political, economic and strategic aspects of the spending. The author emphasizes that the primary intention of military spending by the king during the time period was to protect the Spanish Empire from other European powers, including France and England. The author also discusses the military expenditures of the United Kingdom's royal Exchequer in Mexico in comparison to those of the Spanish Viceroyalty during the time period.

Existing studies have shown how the royal wardrobe, the king's personal administrative office, regularly handled between a quarter and a half of the Crown's annual cash income. Despite this, the financial contribution of the wardrobe to royal finance under Henry III is not fully understood. For a reign in which debates about royal fiscal strategies are so notable a feature, this represents a significant gap. This article will supplement existing studies of wardrobe finance under Henry III by collectively analysing all 15 of the king's wardrobe accounts that are enrolled on the exchequer pipe rolls. The article makes two important findings. Firstly, the wardrobe was financially strong when the period of baronial reform began in 1258. Secondly, the wardrobe's financial strength was the result of a new, and deliberate, approach to acquiring revenue beyond the treasury that targeted sources of income that could generate cash quickly. During Henry's final years, this included greater reliance on credit. These findings suggest Henry III was not incapable of making adroit financial decisions. They also reveal that the foundations for the financial system developed by the three Edwards, which was more reliant on credit and sources of ready cash, were laid under Henry III. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular treatments of earmarks abound with allegations that members of Congress use them to aid their reelection campaigns, but the academic literature has yet to examine whether earmarking influences elections. To begin to fill this void, we search for relationships between earmarking and several facets of electoral competition and outcomes in the 2008 and 2010 House elections. There are three principal findings. First, in both election years, active earmarkers faced weaker primary election competition than other members. Second, in 2008 there was a positive correlation between earmarking and campaign receipts. Third, both of these correlations exist only among Democrats. These findings suggest that earmarks critics might be correct in charging that members, particularly Democrats, benefit from the earmarks they place into spending bills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the economic aspects of the global fiat monetary system that has been prevalent since the early 1970s. The author explores the principles of the fiat system, including the ability of central banks and governments to increase spending when desired and its tendency to avoid financial constraint regarding deficit finance and the over-issue of currency. The author compares the monetary system to that of the mid-20th century monetary management system called the Bretton Woods system.

The article critically analyses the view that Enoch Powell's promotion of the 1962 Hospital Plan was strategically incoherent. It has been argued that there was a contradiction between Powell's economic liberal position on public expenditure and his support for the Plan as a major long-term public sector capital expenditure programme. The article argues that Powell's promotion of the Plan was designed to be part of a consistent economic liberal strategy. However, the approach was problematic because of his mistaken belief that the Plan could be reconciled with modest growth in hospital running costs. This weakness is analysed with reference to the failure by Powell, and by leading officials in the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, to understand the dynamics of acute hospital costs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Colonial state institutions are widely cited as a root cause of sub-Saharan African under-development, but the opinions differ on the channels of causation. Were African colonial states ruled by near absolutist governments who strived to maximize revenue extraction in order to strengthen their grip on native African societies? Or did European powers build 'states without substance', governed with minimal resources and effort, failing to invest in basic public goods? This paper develops an analytical framework for comparing colonial tax and spending patterns and applies it to eight British African colonies (1880-1940). We show that colonial fiscal systems did not adhere to a uniform logic, that minimalism prevailed in West Africa, extractive features were more pronounced in East Africa, and that Mauritius revealed characteristics of a developmental state already before 1940. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an original contribution to the understanding of the relationship between fiscal decentralization and government size. Using a panel data set of the EU-15 countries, we analyse the effect of decentralization on aggregate, national and subnational government sizes by separating the long run effects of decentralization from its short run dynamics. In the long run, tax autonomy reduces central expenditure but increases—and to a greater extent—subnational public expenditure, leading to higher aggregate public expenditure. We find also that vertical imbalances tend to increase the sizes of subnational, national and aggregate governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses 19th-century cartography and its contribution to the appropriation of mountain wilderness. The author explains that cartography was essential in giving mountains their modern shape. The article talks about how mountains gained a factual existence through a combination of aesthetic, scientific, economic, and political concerns with landscape. The author also discusses how Swedish mapmakers used three-dimensional plaster models of mountains to address these issues. Mapmaker Jakob Melchior Ziegler is mentioned.

The long-run tendency for government expenditure to grow relative to GNP, Wagner's law, is tested for six European countries using data from around the mid-19th century to 1913. With few exceptions the results suggest that: nominal and real GNP, nominal and real government expenditure, and population were nonstationary in their levels but stationary in first differences; either nominal GNP and nominal government expenditure and/or real GNP and real government expenditure were cointegrated in five of the six countries, and that these variables were cointegrated with population in the remaining country; and Granger-causality was mainly unidirectional from income to government expenditure. Thus, there is considerable support for Wagner's law in 19th century Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the rise of social spending in Europe during the years 1880-1930. Role of income growth in shaping the rise of social transfers; Aging of the adult population as a leading force raising government transfers; Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) definitions of social expenditures; Tax-and-transfer social programs.

Explores the public sector in the United States in the 1920s. Economic policy of the decade; Comparison of the size and composition of public expenditures and receipts in the 1920s with those of the first two decades of 20th century; Examination of the public sector's size.

Determines the effect of England and Wales' government expenditure and finance in the urban fiscal problem from 1870 to 1914. Expansion of government services over the period; Examination of the emergence of alternatives to rates; Effect of the organization of local governments.

When the 10 percent income tax surcharge was enacted in the summer of 1968, there were many forecasts that this tax increase would significantly dampen economic growth and reduce the rate of increase of prices. There was even some fear that the tax increase coupled with the expenditure ceiling that the U.S. Congress imposed would overkill the inflation and produce a recession. Economic events did not match these predictions. This paper will attempt to identify the reasons why the forecasts for 1968-69 were in error. Conditional forecasts will be derived from simulations obtained from the FRB-MIT econometric model using a variety of assumptions about alternative public policies. The analysis permits to determine whether the forecast errors might have been attributable to inaccurate predictions of public policy. According to authors, the ex ante forecasts of GNP were affected by (1) the failure to predict the mid-1968 easing of monetary policy and (2) the misestimates of federal spending which exceeded the ceiling.

The article discusses the power held by Great Britain's Parliament in regard to public expenditures and taxation during the 1960s. The role that the British Parliament plays in regard to the country's budget, including budget deficits and surpluses, is discussed. An overview of the several parliamentary committees involved in creating British economic policy, including the Select Committee on Economic Affairs, the Estimates Committee, the Standing Committee and the Plowden Committee, is provided.

The article discusses Great Britain's Department of Economic Affairs (D.E.A.) and Economic Planning during the 1960s. The role that the D.E.A. plays in the British economic planning, including in regard to public expenditures and in relation to the control that the government has over the British economy, is discussed. An overview of the British government's efforts to enhance economic development, including its creation of the National Economic Development Council (N.E.D.C.), is provided. The D.E.A.'s relationship with British industries is also discussed.