the futile quest for a grand explanation of long run government expenditure this paper carries out a critical reappraisal of the two contending theories purporting to explain long run government spending wagner s law and different variants of the ratchet effect we analyze data spanning from the early 19 th century until the present day in sweden and the united kingdom hence in contrast to previous studies we evaluate the validity of wagner s law and the ratchet effect hypothesis over a very long time period starting at the beginning of industrialization cointegration analysis is used to investigate the long run relationships between government expenditure and gdp focusing on sub periods and structural breaks moreover we test the ratchet effect hypothesis by estimating models which allow for asymmetric adjustment according to our main results wagner s law does not hold in the long run although the data are consistent with wagner s law between roughly 1860 and the mid 1970s this can be traced to the formation of the modern public sector including the introduction of public education health care and so forth yet wagner s law did not hold during the initial industrialization phase before 1860 and in recent periods gdp only affects the government spending share when we control for population age structure finally we find some evidence of asymmetric adjustment in the uk particularly in the post wwii period however the ratchet effect is not a general cause of the growth of government spending

a test of the wagner s hypothesis for the fiji islands in this article we examine wagner s law for fiji for the period 1970 to 2002 using the johansen 1988 test for cointegration we find one cointegration relationship between national output and government expenditure using five different long run estimators we find robust results on the impact of national income on government expenditure the elasticity ranges from 1 36 to 1 44 implying that a 1 increase in income leads to a 1 36 1 44 increase in government expenditure moreover we find that in the long run national income granger causes government expenditure while these results are consistent with wagner s law we warn policy makers that because fiji s total debt stands at around 69 of gdp in future the bulk of expenditure will go towards debt financing at the expense of productive sectors

determinants of energy productivity in 39 countries an empirical investigation abstract this paper uses three types of analysis to investigate the drivers of energy productivity changes occurring in 39 countries during 1995 2009 we find that increases in sectoral energy productivity were the primary driver behind economy wide energy productivity improvements structural economic shifts away from industry and towards service oriented sectors played a lesser role in aggregate energy productivity improvements nations with similar demographic and economic characteristics showed similar levels of energy productivity and rates of improvement most notably former communist countries and nations undergoing economic liberalization exhibited the highest rate of improvement although they are still less energy productive than developed nations moreover the econometric analysis reinforces the long standing hypothesis that higher levels of income per capita and higher energy prices are associated with greater energy productivity while a greater share of output from industry is associated with lower energy productivity levels in particular higher energy prices and income levels are associated with improvements in sectoral energy productivity

causality between public expenditure and national income this paper deploys the granger method to determine the directions and patterns of causality between national income and total as well as various components of public expenditure empirical results based on the data for india 1950 81 suggest that while at the disaggregate level the causal process is rather diverse it is essentially feed back type at the aggregate level it neither confirms the wagnerian income public expenditure nor the keynesian public expenditure national income view the paper recommends that two variables be treated as jointly dependent in both the public finance and macroeconometric studies

measuring the energy security implications of fossil fuel resource concentration abstract economic assessments of the welfare effects of energy insecurity are typically uncertain and fail to provide clear guidance to policy makers as a result governments have had little analytical support to complement expert judgment in the assessment of energy security this is likely to be inadequate when considering multiple policy goals and in particular the intersections between energy security and climate change mitigation policies this paper presents an alternative approach which focuses on gauging the causes of energy insecurity as a way to assist policy making the paper focuses on the energy security implications of fossil fuel resource concentration and distinguishes between the price and physical availability components of energy insecurity it defines two separate indexes the energy security price index espi based on the measure of market concentration in competitive fossil fuel markets and the energy security physical availability index espai based on the measure of supply flexibility in regulated markets the paper illustrates the application of espi and espai with two case studies france and the united kingdom looking at the evolution of both indexes to 2030

on the casual relationship between government expenditures and national income a research strategy is suggested that separates the issue of inference from the problems of prediction or of quantitative policy analysis of an empirical parametric model and illustrates a new methodology that enables this in a test for prima facie causality unlike the conventional parametric test the more powerful multiple rank f test is invariant to monotonic transformations of the variables and independent of the error distribution employing this test the wagnerian hypothesis supported by conventional parametric analysis is rejected and the conventional keynesian theory is accepted copyright 1990 by mit press

determinants of energy demand in the french service sector a decomposition analysis abstract this paper analyzes the changes in the energy consumption of the service sector in france over the period 1995 2006 using the logarithmic mean divisia index i lmdi i decomposition method the analysis is carried out at various disaggregation levels to highlight the specifics of each sub sector and end use according to their respective determinants the results show that in this period the economic growth of the service sector was the main factor that led to the increase in total energy consumption structure productivity substitution and intensity effects restricted this growth but with limited effect by analyzing each end use this paper enables a more precise understanding of the impact of these factors the activity effect was the main determinant of the increase in energy consumption for all end uses except for air conditioning for which the equipment rate effect was the main factor structural changes in the service sector primarily impacted energy consumption for space heating and cooking improvements in productivity limited the growth of energy consumption for all end uses except for cooking finally energy efficiency improvements mainly affected space heating energy use

an econometric test of wagner s law for six countries based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the present study empirically examined five different versions of wagner s law by employing annual time series data on six countries over the period 1951 1996 three countries are part of the emerging industrialized countries of asia south korea taiwan thailand and three are industrialized countries japan usa and the united kingdom the analysis is an advance over previous work in two ways first the stationarity propertities of the data and the order of integration of the data are empirically investigated using the augmented dickey fuller adf and the kwiatkowski et al journal of econometrics 1 1992 kpss tests and second the hypothesis of a long run relationship between income and government spending is tested using bivariate cointegrated systems and employing the methodology of cointegration analysis as suggested by johansen journal of economic dynamics and control 12 1988 and johansen and juselius oxford bulletin of economics and statistics 52 1990 the results indicate that

what drives the change in china s energy intensity combining decomposition analysis and econometric analysis at the provincial level abstract we employ decomposition analysis and econometric analysis to investigate the driving forces behind china s changing energy intensity using a provincial level panel data set for the period from 1995 to 2009 the decomposition analysis indicates that a all of the provinces except for a few experienced efficiency improvement while around three fourths of the provinces economics became more energy intensive or remained unchanged b consequently the efficiency improvement accounts for more than 90 of china s energy intensity change as opposed to the economic structural change the econometric analysis shows that the rising income plays a significant role in the reduction of energy intensity while the effect of energy price is relatively limited the result may reflect the urgency of deregulating the price and establishing a market oriented pricing system in china s energy sector the implementation of the energy intensity reduction policies in the eleventh five year plan fyp has helped reverse the increasing trend of energy intensity since 2002 although the chinese government intended to change the industry led economic growth pattern it seems that most of the policy effects flow through the efficiency improvement as opposed to the economic structure adjustment more fundamental changes to the economic structure are needed to achieve more sustainable progress in energy intensity reduction

mapping the evolution of energy growth nexus synergies and trade offs the study explores the intellectual structure development and evolution of energy crisis and economic growth research through bibliometric analysis of research articles on energy growth nexus from 2000 to 2017 by using citespace where gephi is used to analyse the authors collaboration the analysis incorporates 27 152 references cited by 344 authors in 1165 articles and from 330 journals the results of study quantitatively present the most cited articles authors countries institutions and intellectual structure with data visualization in the knowledge domain of energy growth nexus the study categorizes the major research areas in energy growth nexus research as carbon dioxide emission electricity consumption heterogeneous panel real income renewable energy and financial development the study discusses emerging trends which provide the future research fronts and intellectual development within the framework of energy growth nexus

does financial agglomeration promote the increase of energy efficiency in china abstract whether financial agglomeration is conducive to the improvement of energy efficiency is of great significance for china to better follow the path of energy conservation and emission reduction and green sustainable development based on the balanced panel data of 285 cities in china from 2005 to 2017 this paper analyzes the impact of financial agglomeration on energy efficiency theoretical analysis shows that financial agglomeration can influence energy efficiency through scale economy effect innovation driving effect information spillover effect and structural adjustment effect dynamic spatial econometric results show that from a national perspective financial agglomeration has a positive impact on energy efficiency however from the perspective of different regions and different city sizes it is found that financial agglomeration can have different effects on energy efficiency financial agglomeration has a significant positive impact on energy efficiency in eastern and central regions megacities and big cities financial agglomeration has a significant negative impact on energy efficiency in western china and has no significant effect on energy efficiency in medium sized and small cities finally based on the conclusions of the study specific proposals for financial agglomeration to improve energy efficiency are proposed

did household consumption become more volatile i show that after accounting for predictable variation arising from movements in real interest rates preferences and income shocks liquidity constraints and measurement errors volatility of household consumption in the us increased by 25 percent between 1970 and 2004 the increase was lower than that of volatility of family income nonwhite and those with less than 13 years of education for whom there was no differential increase in income volatility experienced a significantly larger increase in volatility of household consumption substantial differences in wealth and access to credit markets point to the main reason for this divide jel d12 d14 e21 j15

wagner s hypothesis in time series and cross section perspectives evidence from real data for 115 countries internationally comparable data on income and government expenditure for 115 countries covering the period 1950 80 are used to assess the validity of wagner s hypothesis individual country time series data and several intercountry cross sections are studied besides a tremendous diversity in the position for various countries the results indicate that while there is support for the hypothesis in some time series data sets such support is lacking in most cross section estimates much of the support for the hypothesis reported in many earlier studies therefore was probably due to either use of limited samples or inadequate data comparability across the observations studied copyright 1987 by mit press

a bound testing analysis of wagner s law in nigeria 1970 2006 this study tests wagner s law the tendency for government activities to expand along with economic expansion for nigeria using annual time series data between 1970 and 2006 it adopts the bounds test approach proposed by pesaran et al 2001 based on unrestricted error correction model uecm and toda and yamamoto s 1995 granger noncausality tests empirical results from the bounds test indicate that there exists no long run relationship between government expenditure and output in nigeria in addition toda and yamamoto s 1995 causality test results show that wagner s law does not hold for more than the period being tested rather we found a weak empirical support in the proposition by keynes that public expenditure is an exogenous factor and a policy instrument for increasing national income

who is credit constrained in the u s economy an important assumption of the life cycle model of consumption is the postulate of perfect capital markets this hypothesis has recently been challenged by substantial empirical evidence hall and mishkin 1982 using the panel study of income dynamics estimate that 20 percent of united states families are liquidity constrained mariger 1986 derives a life cycle model with endogenous liquidity constraints and using a cross section estimates this fraction to be 19 4 percent hubbard and judd 1986 simulate a model with a constraint on net worth which shows that with reasonable assumptions about preferences 19 0 percent of united states consumers are liquidity constrained the emerging consensus points therefore to a fraction of approximately 20 percent of the population behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the pure life cycle model in addition hayashi 1985 and zeldes 1989 investigate the correlation among consumption wealth and income for various population groups and infer that liquidity constraints are more important for younger families with low levels of wealth and saving the main limitation of these studies is that in their data sets constrained consumers are not observable and have to be identified via indirect evidence thus there is as yet little firm evidence about the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to be credit constrained this paper adopts an approach that differs from previous tests for liquidity constraints because it makes use of data where constrained consumers are observable and explicitly links their existence to credit market imperfections and personal characteristics the data drawn from the 1983 survey of consumer finances scf and described in section ii provide information on individuals whose request for credit has been rejected by financial intermediaries in section iii a model is developed in which consumers and lenders behavior jointly determines the probability that a consumer is rationed in the credit market this probability is then

wagner s law revisited cointegration and causality tests for new zealand wagner s law states that the share of government expenditure in gross national product gnp will increase with economic development many associated empirical studies substitute gnp with gross domestic product gdp this article presents an empirical investigation into the validity of wagner s law for new zealand over the period 1960 to 2007 and compares the results obtained using these two measures of output application of the autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds test suggests a cointegrating relationship between either output measure and the share of government spending and further application of general to specific gets engle and granger eg phillip hansen s fully modified ordinary least squares fmols and johansen s time series techniques illustrate statistical robustness and an income elasticity between 0 56 and 0 84 the results suggest that output measures granger cause the share of government expenditure in the long run thereby providing support for wagner s law and these resul

intertemporal nonseparability or borrowing restrictions a disaggregate analysis using a u s consumption panel we propose a method to test for liquidity constraints which relies on using the within period marginal rate of substitution condition as a benchmark to evaluate the intertemporal euler equation if spot markets for nondurable goods exist but financial markets either do not exist or are imperfect we show how the comparison of first order conditions involving the relevant spot and intertemporal prices can be used to detect the imperfection we apply our methodology to a large sample of u s households drawn from twelve years of the consumer expenditure survey allowing for a general nonseparable preference structure our estimates of first order conditions do not indicate the presence of liquidity constraints with the possible exception of young households

how to boost energy productivity in china s industrial sector an integrated decomposition framework based on multi dimensional factors abstract the industrial sector is a pillar for china s economy improving the energy productivity is of great significance to mitigate the discrepancy between energy use and energy supply as well as the economic development and environmental friendliness this paper extended the previous decomposition method by introducing six new components energy output oriented regional efficiency energy output oriented scale economy energy output oriented pure technical efficiency these new factors can uncover the impacts of regional balance development scale economy optimization and resource allocation efficiency change on energy productivity the main research results indicate that during the 2000 2016 period 1 industrial energy productivity yield progressively increased and the discrepancies of energy productivity in different regions were obvious eastern region represented the best energy productivity performance followed by the central and western regions 2 technological progress in both energy saving and production were two principal contributors to energy productivity growth overall the pure technical efficiency also promoted energy productivity suggesting that resource allocation efficiencies were performed well in both the energy market and the output market 3 by contrast both the energy and output oriented scale economy effect failed to promote energy productivity growth besides the energy oriented and output oriented regional efficiency had opposite impacts on energy productivity the former one had the inhibiting effects while the last one had the promoting effects finally several relevant suggestions for policymakers were provided

energy intensity a decomposition and counterfactual exercise for latin american countries abstract this paper investigates trends in energy intensity over the last 40 years based on a sample of 75 countries it applies the fisher ideal index to decompose the energy intensity into the relative contributions of energy efficiency and economic structure then the determinants of these energy indexes are examined through panel data regression techniques special attention is lent to latin american countries lac by comparing its performance to that of a similar set of countries chosen through the synthetic control method when analyzed by income level energy intensity has decreased in a range between 40 and 54 in low and medium income countries respectively efficiency improvements drive these changes while the structural effect does not represent a clear source of change the regression analysis shows that per capita income petroleum prices fuel energy mix and gdp growth are main determinants of energy intensity and efficiency while there are no clear correlations with the activity component in the case of lac the energy intensity decreased around 20 which could be interpreted as an under performance however the counterfactual exercise suggests that lac has closed the gap with respect to its synthetic control

testing wagner versus keynes using disaggregated public expenditure data for canada this paper attempts to test wagnerian versus keynesian hypotheses by examining the relationship between national income and total public expenditure as well as its various components for canada during the period 1950 1995 engle and granger s two step cointegration and error correction techniques are employed to test these two hypotheses the results of this study support both the hypotheses when tested with broader aggregate expenditure data i e total government current expenditure ce and total current expenditures on goods and services cegs although the results of this study do not support the existence of any long run relationship between gdp and the disaggregated public expenditure variables they do support the existence of short run causation implying that national income may be causing or caused by a component of the total government current expenditure in the short run

energy intensity developments in 40 major economies structural change or technology improvement this study analyzes energy intensity trends and drivers in 40 major economies using the wiod database a novel harmonized and consistent dataset of input output table time series accompanied by environmental satellite data we use logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition to 1 study trends in global energy intensity between 1995 and 2007 2 attribute efficiency changes to either changes in technology or changes in the structure of the economy and 3 highlight sectoral and regional differences we first show that heterogeneity within each sector across countries is high these general trends within the sectors are dominated by large economies first and foremost the united states in most cases heterogeneity is lower within each country across the different sectors regarding changes of energy intensity at the country level improvements between 1995 and 2007 are largely attributable to technological change while structural change is less important in most countries notable exceptions are japan the united states australia taiwan mexico and brazil where a change in the industry mix was the main driver behind the observed energy intensity reduction

consumption volatility liquidity constraints and household welfare we evaluate the impact of increased income uncertainty and financial liberalisation in the us on consumption volatility and household welfare we estimate euler equations and measure the volatility of unpredictable changes in consumption as the squared residuals we directly control for liquidity constraints using survey of consumer finances data on access to credit and document that despite the increase in household debt between 1983 and 2007 there was no decline in the proportion of liquidity constrained households consumption volatility increased significantly over this period especially for liquidity constrained households indicating substantial welfare losses

the effects of economic and policy incentives on carbon mitigation technologies the ability to estimate the likely effects of potential climate change policies on energy use and greenhouse gas ghg emissions requires an improved understanding of the relationship between different policy alternatives and energy saving and ghg reducing changes in technology a particularly important and understudied aspect of this set of issues is the conceptual and empirical modeling of how the various stages of technological change are interrelated how they unfold over time in response to market forces and the differential impact of various policies for example r d subsidies environmental taxes information programs we summarize several contributions to this literature and suggest promising areas for continued research on empirical analysis and modeling of induced technological change

testing wagner s law using disaggregated public expenditure data in the case of greece 1958 93 the factors that have influenced the growth of public expenditures have been the subject of extensive theoretical and empirical research the validity of wagner s law in the case of greece is tested using disaggregated public expenditure data for the period 1958 93 the methodology employed is that of cointegration and the related notion of error correction results reported here suggest that in the case of greece only the growth of defence expenditure may be explained in terms of wagner s law

keynes versus wagner public expenditure and national income for three african countries the public expenditure income hypothesis has long been debated in economics following keynes public expenditure is seen as an exogenous factor to be used as a policy instrument to influence growth on the other hand wagner argues that expenditure is an endogenous factor or an outcome not a cause of growth in national income the purpose of this paper is to apply both the granger and holmes hutton statistical procedures to test the income expenditure hypothesis for three african countries ghana kenya and south africa we find that the hypothesis of public expenditure causing national income is not supported by the data for these african countries

cointegration and wagner s hypothesis time series evidence for canada it is argued that wagner s hypothesis is essentially a proposition about the secular comovement of income growth and public spending using the engle and granger cointegration tests and time series data from canada the long run validity of wagner s hypothesis is maintained

short and long term relation between economic development and government spending the role of quality of institutions abstractthis paper tests the wagner s assumption of the one sided directional flow moving from economic growth to public spending considering an international database over the 1996 2012 period by

factor substitution and energy productivity fluctuation in china a parametric decomposition analysis abstract technical research on energy productivity can support government officials as they evaluate practical energy policies for the future this study proposed a parametric method to decompose china s energy productivity rate of change into six factors based on a theoretical stochastic frontier analysis the method was applied to conduct an empirical study using inter provincial panel data in china from 1995 to 2012 the results highlighted three key points first the general rate of change in energy productivity was mainly influenced by a steady positive rate of change in technical progress combined with a steady negative rate of change in technical efficiency the core factors causing fluctuations in energy productivity included a positive rate of change in the substitution of capital and energy and a negative rate of change in the substitution of labor and energy second from a geographic perspective provinces with a high rate of change in technical progress experienced a weaker deterioration in technical efficiency however the rate of change in technical efficiency tends to decline as the rate of change in technical progress increases third there is a similar changing trend between the substitution of capital and energy and the substitution of labor and energy

a logistic growth theory of public expenditures a study of five countries over 100 years this paper offers a new theory and empirical testing of long term trends of public expenditures for five countries while wagner s law would imply an exponential growth process of the ratio between public expenditures and national income g y the law should be rejected both on theoretical and empirical grounds because it disregards the role of ever increasing distortionary taxation however under some conditions the combination of wagner s law and the pigou s conjecture that the excess burden of taxation constrains the growth of public expenditures can be captured by a non linear first order differential equation the equation is the verhulst s logistic originally invented to model malthusian predictions on population growth the integration of a verhulst equation generates an s shaped curve this analytical framework combines intuitions from a welfare economics and a public choice perspective and potentially offers a new research strategy on the dynamics of government expenditures we offer preliminary econometric estimates on long run trends around 1870 1990 of g y in u s u k france germany italy these estimates confirm a pattern of similar trajectories in spite of different national parameters and suggest that the logistic view of growth of government is consistent with observed data

public expenditure growth in greece and portugal wagner s law and beyond in the tradition of wagner s law this study examines the relationship between aggregate income and public expenditures in greece and portugal during the years 1958 85 unlike more conventional specifications our analysis focuses on the movement of different componenets of public expenditures permanent income relative prices stabilization policy and socio political factors emerge as thomain determinants of public expenditures while the results reveal significant difference in responses to these determinants across components of expenditures and between the two countries