IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/jbwige/v50y2009i1p209-226n18.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Adolph Wagner und sein „Gesetz": Einige späte Anmerkungen

Author

Listed:
  • Dluhosch Barbara
  • Zimmermann Klaus W.

Abstract

Starting from the secular fact of an increasing government's share, a retrospective on Adolph Wagner's writings seems worthwhile. A leading German economist of the Bismarck era, he first formulated the famous "law of increasing state activity" for industrializing nations. After analyzing his way of making his case, a couple of flaws inherent to the theoretical interpretations and empirical verifications of his law are discussed. Basically, these flaws are attributable to the neglect of three important factors in Wagner's rationale, namely that his law was destined for industrializing rather than industrialized nations and the growing importance of public enterprises and of the prevention principle instead of repressive actions of the state in case of violation of rules. On the other hand, very modern interpretations of Wagner suggesting that he had the growing excess burden of taxation in mind when discussing the limits of government's share do not seem justified.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Dluhosch Barbara & Zimmermann Klaus W., 2009. "Adolph Wagner und sein „Gesetz": Einige späte Anmerkungen," Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook, De Gruyter, vol. 50(1), pages 209-226, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bpj:jbwige:v:50:y:2009:i:1:p:209-226:n:18
    DOI: 10.1524/jbwg.2009.50.1.209
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1524/jbwg.2009.50.1.209
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1524/jbwg.2009.50.1.209?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andreas Arnauld & Klaus Zimmermann, 2013. "Regulating government (’s share): the fifty-percent rule of the federal constitutional court in Germany," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 35(1), pages 1-19, February.
    2. Daniele Corado & Stefano Solari, 2010. "Natural law as inspiration to Adolph Wagner's theory of public intervention," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(4), pages 865-879.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B13 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Neoclassical through 1925 (Austrian, Marshallian, Walrasian, Wicksellian)
    • H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
    • N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:jbwige:v:50:y:2009:i:1:p:209-226:n:18. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.