On Sun, 18 Jun 2000, Alejandro Dubrovsky wrote:
>If you go by approximations, you would have to define some sort of
>scale. I suggest the following crude measurement which i have only
>toyed with, but which seems to serve the purpose (getting quick
>simplistic comparisons) quite well which is the ratio of government
>expenditure to national GDP (i like it because they are the same units,
>seems to distill any kind of political system from the answer (it
>doesn't matter if its dictatorial or democratic) and it feels like it's
>measuring the right things).
>
>i happen to only know the numbers for two countries: Australia (25-28%)
>and Argentina (15-16%). By feel (coincidentally, i've lived for more
>than 10 years in each of those countries), Argentina feels much more
>free market (lack of government handouts, much lower, flatter taxes,
>much less hassling with council standards, etc). I'm almost sure i
>don't have to explain which one is economically better off. I couldn't
>find a list of this ratio for other countries in a quick search through
>the web but if anyone's got numbers for other countries i'd like to hear
>what they are (especially for the US, sweden, japan and a sprinkle of
>'third-worlders').
The CIA World Fackbook is a good source for these sort of numbers. See:
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/
-matt
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:39 MDT