Do Government Expenditures in G7 Countries Target Socioeconomics or Physical Output?

Abstract

The issue of valuable government policy interventions has not been fully addressed. Therefore, this paper analyzes the impact of government capital expenditure on production efficiency in the G7 countries. Two models are estimated with different dependent variables: the Human Development Index (HDI) as a dependent variable to capture the socio-economic impact and the gross domestic product (GDP) as a dependent variable to capture the physical impact. The paper uses a set of panel data for the G7 countries spanning the years 2000–2018, which were obtained from the World Development Indicators (WDI) database. The paper applies stochastic production frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate each country’s yearly efficiency and to estimate the impact of government expenditure on the overall technical inefficiency for both models. The results demonstrate that increasing government expenditure boosts the inefficiency in the G7 countries in the HDI model, but it depresses inefficiency in the GDP model. This may suggest that government capital expenditure in the G7 countries was directed toward increasing physical output—not toward socio-economic outputs such as health and educational output—during the study period. Furthermore, the results show that the estimated average technical efficiency over the study period was 93.4% for the HDI model and 81.2% for the GDP model. Finally, the results show that the G7 countries’ objectives were not similar in this area, with some countries using socioeconomic-oriented policies and others using physical-capital-oriented policies.