Government spending and economic growth relationship: can a better institutional quality fix the outcomes?

Abstract

Empirical growth literature finds conflicting results on the relationship between public spending and long-run economic growth. This paper shows that the nature of relationship between the two variables depends upon the institutional quality of a country. Our empirical investigation relies upon OLS, fixed-effects and system-GMM estimators for a large panel of 113 developed and developing economies during the period 1981–2015. The main findings confirm that the adverse impact of public size on output growth holds only for countries with poor institutional quality. By contrast, when the institutional quality exceeds certain thresholds, the growth inhibiting effects of government size become insignificant. From the fiscal policy viewpoint, these outcomes imply that the productivity of public spending is more important than an excessively large public size of the country.