Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Federal Legislative Activism in Australia: A New Approach to Testing Wagner's Law

Contents:

Author Info

  • Stephen Kirchner

Abstract

Legislation is an important output of the political process. Growth in legislation can serve as a proxy for growth in the size and role of government, side-stepping some of the endogeneity problems encountered in estimating relationships between government spending and revenue and national income. This paper considers the relationship between government growth and real GDP per capita by developing three models of federal legislative output in Australia since the country's founding in 1901. The models explain growth in (1) the number of acts of parliament; (2) the total number of pages of legislation enacted; and (3) a measure of legislative complexity based on the annual average number of pages per act. The growth in the number of acts is found to be negatively related to growth in real national income per capita in the short-run, implying that legislative output responds to temporary economic shocks, but without a robust long-run relationship with the level of income. The growth in the number of pages of legislation enacted and legislative complexity also show a negative short-run relationship with growth in real national income per capita, but a positive long-run relationship with the level of income that is consistent with Wagner's (1890) law of 'increasing state activity.' However, both the short and long-run relationships are statistically significant only for the post-World War II period, raising questions about the general applicability of Wagner's law.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.finance.uts.edu.au/research/wpapers/wp161.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney in its series Working Paper Series with number 161.

as in new window
Length: 19
Date of creation: 01 Jul 2010
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:uts:wpaper:161

Contact details of provider:
Postal: PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
Phone: +61 2 9514 7777
Fax: +61 2 9514 7711
Web page: http://www.business.uts.edu.au/finance/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: Wagner?s law; Australia; legislation; economic growth;

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

No references listed on IDEAS
You can help add them by filling out this form.

Citations

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:uts:wpaper:161

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Duncan Ford).

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.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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