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Labour Costs and the Size of Government

Author

Listed:
  • François Facchini

    (CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Mickaël Melki

    (UNIFR - Université de Fribourg = University of Fribourg)

  • Andrew C. Pickering

    (Department of Economics and Related Studies - University of York [York, UK])

Abstract
Given inelastic demand for labour‐intensive public services, the size of government depends positively on labour costs. OECD data exhibit a strong statistical association between government size and the business‐sector labour share of income. When the labour share is instrumented with measures of technological change, institutional variation and predetermined data it continues to positively impact government size. In contrast, transfer spending is unaffected by the labour share. The evidence is consistent with the idea that the recent decline in the labour share has contributed to the slowdown in the growth of government witnessed in much of the post‐war era.

Suggested Citation

  • François Facchini & Mickaël Melki & Andrew C. Pickering, 2016. "Labour Costs and the Size of Government," Post-Print hal-01344639, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01344639
    DOI: 10.1111/obes.12140
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01344639
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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    Cited by:

    1. Antonio Pacifico, 2019. "Panel Bayesian VAR Modeling for Policy and Forecasting when dealing with confounding and latent effects," Journal of Statistical and Econometric Methods, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 8(1), pages 1-1.
    2. Melki, Mickael & Pickering, Andrew, 2019. "New evidence on the historical growth of government in Europe: The role of labor costs," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 445-460.
    3. Weijie Luo & Andrew Pickering & Paulo Santos Monteiro, 2017. "Inequality and the Size of Government," Discussion Papers 17/02, Department of Economics, University of York.
    4. Weijie Luo, 2022. "Inequality and growth in the twenty‐first century," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 69(4), pages 345-366, September.
    5. Emmanuel Apergis & Nicholas Apergis, 2021. "The impact of COVID-19 on economic growth: evidence from a Bayesian Panel Vector Autoregressive (BPVAR) model," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 53(58), pages 6739-6751, December.
    6. Weijie Luo, 2017. "Inequality and Growth in the 21st Century," Discussion Papers 17/18, Department of Economics, University of York.
    7. Antonio Pacifico, 2019. "Structural Panel Bayesian VAR Model to Deal with Model Misspecification and Unobserved Heterogeneity Problems," Econometrics, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-24, March.

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