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The Role of Government in Anti-Social Redistributive Activities

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Author Info
Konstantinos Angelopoulos ()
Apostolis Philippopoulos ()

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Abstract

It is known that anti-social redistributive activities (rent seeking, tax evasion, corruption, violation of property rights, delay of socially beneficial reforms, etc) hurt the macroeconomy. But it is less known what is the role of government size as a determinant of such activities. We use data from 64 counties (both developed and developing) in 5-year periods over 1980-2000. As a measure of anti-social activities, we use the ICRG index; as a measure of government size, we use the government share in GDP; and as a measure of government efficiency, we construct an index by following the methodology of Afonso, Schuknecht and Tanzi (2003). Our regressions show that what really matters to social incentives is the relation between size and efficiency. Specifically, while a larger size of government is bad for incentives when one ignores efficiency, the results change drastically when government efficiency is also taken into account. Only when our measure of size exceeds our measure of efficiency, larger public sectors are bad for incentives. By contrast, when efficiency exceeds size, larger public sectors are not bad; actually, in the case where efficiency is measured by government performance in the policy areas of administration, stabilization and infrastructure, larger public sectors significantly improve incentives.

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Paper provided by CESifo Group Munich in its series CESifo Working Paper Series with number CESifo Working Paper No. 1427.

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Date of creation: 2005
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Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_1427

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Related research
Keywords: government and behaviour of agents; collective decision-making;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government
H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Adam, Antonis & Delis, Manthos D & Kammas, Pantelis, 2009. "Are democratic governments more efficient?," MPRA Paper 15843, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
  2. Antonis Adam & Manthos D. Delis & Pantelis Kammas, 2008. "Fiscal Decentralization and Public Sector Efficiency: Evidence from OECD Countries," CESifo Working Paper Series CESifo Working Paper No. , CESifo Group Munich. [Downloadable!]
  3. Adam, Antonis & Delis, Manthos D & Kammas, Pantelis, 2008. "Public sector efficiency: Leveling the playing field between OECD countries," MPRA Paper 16493, University Library of Munich, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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