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Federal, State, and Local Governments: Evaluating their Separate Roles in US Growth

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  • Higgins, Matthew
  • Young, Andrew
  • Levy, Daniel

Abstract

We use US county level data (3,058 observations) from 1970 to 1998 to explore the relationship between economic growth and the extent of government employment at three levels: federal, state and local. We find that increases in federal, state and local government employments are all negatively associated with economic growth. We find no evidence that government is more efficient at lower levels. While we cannot separate out the productive and redistributive services of government, we document that the county-level income distribution became slightly more unequal from 1970 to 1998. For those who justify government activities in terms of equity concerns – perhaps even trading off economic growth for equity – the burden falls on them to show that the income distribution would have widened more in the absence of government activities. We conclude that a release of government-employed labor inputs to the private sector would be growth-enhancing.

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Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 13094.

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Date of creation: 29 Jan 2009
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Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:13094

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Keywords: Economic Growth; Federal Government; State Government; Local Government; County-Level Data; Metro and Non-Metro Counties; Income Distribution; Equity;

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References

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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. Shanaka Herath, 2010. "The Size of the Government and Economic Growth: An Empirical Study of Sri Lanka," SRE-Disc sre-disc-2010_05, Institute for the Environment and Regional Development, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business.
  2. Young, Andrew & Higgins, Matthew & Levy, Daniel, 2006. "Heterogeneous Convergence," MPRA Paper 954, University Library of Munich, Germany.

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