Public Spending In The 20th Century

After a detailed account of reform experiences in several countries and the public debate regarding government reform, the study closes with an outlook on the future role of the state, a period when globalization may require and people may want "leaner" but not "meaner" states."--Jacket.

Government is the single most pervasive institution of modern life, with all facets affected by public sector activities. Over the last 100 years, government spending around the world has grown in terms of both spending percapita and share of national output. During the twentieth century, the relative size of government grew steadily, with surges during the two world wars. Figure 1.1 shows general government expenditure as a share of national output for the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom from 1948 to 2011. In 1870, government spending to GDP ratios in these countries were well below 10 percent (Tanzi, 2011: 8), but those ratios had more than tripled by the end of the twentieth century and have continued to grow in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Given high government spending, debt and the new challenges on the horizon, the themes of this work are more relevant than ever: the essential tool of spending by the state, its 'value for money', likely risks in the future, and the remedies to create lean, efficient and sustainable government. This book takes a holistic and international approach, covering most advanced countries, and discusses a historical overview of public expenditure, from the nineteenth century to the modern day, as well as future challenges. It sees the government's role as providing sound rules of the game and essential public goods and services. In presenting the relevant arguments, information and policy recommendations through comprehensive tables, charts and historical facts, the book addresses a broad readership, including students, professionals and interested members of the public.

This paper discusses the role of the state from a historical perspective. It outlines how that role has changed over the past hundred years and discusses the forces that have promoted the changes. In the period between 1913 and 1980, there was a large increase in public spending in industrial countries and a considerable expansion in the role of the government in the economy in all countries. The paper also outlines the intellectual developments that, starting in the 1970s, have brought about a reaction to the large role that the state has come to play in the economy.

This work examines public expenditure, explaining the size and the structure of the system of public finance. Suitable for use as a course text, it can function as a point of departure for empirical and analytical studies on the behaviour of governments.

The developing history of consumption is not so much a separate field, as a prism through which many aspects of social and political life may be viewed. The essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches in Europe and America; yet their commonalities suggest recent directions in the scholarship, raising such themes as consumption and democracy, the development of a global economy, the role of the state, the centrality of consumption to Cold War politics, the importance of the Second World War as a historical divide, the language of consumption, the contexts of locality, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, and the environmental consequences of twentieth-century consumer society. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, they explore the role of the historian as social, political, and moral critic. The essays discuss products, corporate strategies, government policies, and ideas about consumption. Unlike other studies of twentieth-century consumption, this book provides international comparisons.

The book offers a critical assessment of the state of current knowledge on the distributional impacts of public spending for developing and transition countries. It focuses on the distribution of benefits from spending categories that have traditionally been seen as pro-poor, including education and health expenditures, food subsidies, cash transfers, and public employment schemes.

In an era of promises to create smaller, more limited government, Americans often forget that the federal government has amassed an extraordinary record of successes over the past half century. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, it helped rebuild Europe after World War II, conquered polio and other life-threatening diseases, faced down communism, attacked racial discrimination, reduced poverty among the elderly, and put men on the moon. In Government's Greatest Achievements, Paul C. Light explores the federal government's most successful accomplishments over the previous five decades and anticipates the most significant challenges of the next half century. While some successes have come through major legislation such as the 1965 Medicare Act, or large-scale efforts like the Apollo space program, most have been achieved through collections of smaller, often unheralded statutes. Drawing on survey responses from 230 historians and 220 political scientists at colleges and universities nationwide, Light ranks and summarizes the fifty greatest government achievements from 1944 to 1999. The achievements were ranked based on difficulty, importance, and degree of success. Through a series of twenty vignettes, he paints a vivid picture of the most intense government efforts to improve the quality of life both at home and abroad—from enhancing health care and workplace safety, to expanding home ownership, to improving education, to protecting endangered species, to strengthening the national defense. The book also examines how Americans perceive government's greatest achievements, and reveals what they consider to be its most significant failures. America is now calling on the government to resolve another complex, difficult problem: the defeat of terrorism. Light concludes by discussing this enormous task, as well as government's other greatest priorities for the next fifty years.