Re: ECON: size of government negatively correlated with

Robin Hanson (hanson@econ.berkeley.edu)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 10:44:54 -0800

Han Huang wrote:
>I did some number crunching. Using the G7 economic data, I ran a
>covariance analysis on Matlab and my least mean squares estimate
>showed:
>
>1% GDP more spending
> --> 0.35% higher unemployment
> --> -$196 purchasing power per capita
>
>1% GDP more taxation
> --> 0.44% higher unemployment
> --> -$334 purchasing power per capita (before taxes)
>...
>Observe that the more socialist a nation is, the higher its
>unemployment rate, and in general the less wealthy it is.

There is a big literature which compares countries trying to infer what makes them differ in wealth, etc. You'd really do better to track that literature down, than to throw together an OLS from 8 data points. Here is an example of a related paper, that I happened to have in my mail inbox:

http://nberws.nber.org/papers/W6727

"The Quality of Government"

      BY:  RAFAEL LA PORTA
              Harvard University
           FLORENCIO LOPEZ-DE-SILANES
              Harvard University
              Department of Economics
           ANDREI SHLEIFER
              Harvard University
           ROBERT VISHNY
              University of Chicago

Paper ID:  National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No.
           6727

Date: September 1998
 Contact:  RAFAEL LA PORTA
   Email:  Mailto:laporta@nber.org
  Postal:  Harvard University
           Littauer Building, #114
           Cambridge, MA 02138  USA
   Phone:  (617)868-3900
     Fax:  (617)868-2742
 Co-Auth:  FLORENCIO LOPEZ-DE-SILANES

Email: Mailto:f_lopezdesilanes@harvard.edu Postal: Harvard University
           Department of Economics
           110 Littauer Center
           Cambridge, MA 02138  USA
 Co-Auth:  ANDREI SHLEIFER

Email: Mailto:ashleifer@harvard.edu
Postal: Harvard University
           M9 Littauer Center
           Cambridge, MA 02138  USA
 Co-Auth:  ROBERT VISHNY

Email: Mailto:vishny@gsb.uchicago.edu Postal: University of Chicago
           1101 East 58th Street
           Chicago, IL 60637  USA

Hard Copy Paper Requests:
Full-Text Availability at http://www.nber.org/wwp.html Papers can be downloaded online for $5. Hard copies are $10 plus $10.00/order outside the USA. Prepayment required. NBER orders: Mailto:orders@nber.org Checks, Mastercard, Visa and American Express to 1050 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138. Phone:(617)868-3900. Fax:(617)349-3955. For NBER Subscriptions Mailto:subs@nber.org or write to "Subscriptions" at address above.

ABSTRACT:
We investigate empirically the determinants of the quality of governments in a large cross-section of countries. We assess government performance using measures of government intervention, public sector efficiency, public good provision, size of government, and political freedom. We find that countries that are poor, close to the equator, ethnolinguistically heterogeneous, use French or socialist laws, or have high proportions of Catholics or Muslims exhibit inferior government performance. We also find that the larger governments tend to be the better performing ones. The importance of historical factors in explaining the variation in government performance across countries sheds light on the economic, political, and cultural theories of institutions.

JEL Classification: H11, N40, P50

Robin Hanson

hanson@econ.berkeley.edu     http://hanson.berkeley.edu/   
RWJF Health Policy Scholar             FAX: 510-643-8614 
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 510-643-1884