Economic growth, equilibrium welfare, and public goods provision with intergenerational altruism

Abstract

This study examines the government policy of public goods provision and its effects on economic growth and welfare under intergenerational altruism. The study considers an endogenous growth model with altruistic overlapping generations. The preferences of the current youth exhibit a future bias, and thus, democratically elected governments are subject to this future bias. The optimal rule for the supply of public goods under future bias differs from the original Samuelson rule. Unlike the standard growth model without any bias, under the optimal rule, the equilibrium growth rate is not independent of government size. Future bias gives young generations the dynamic incentives to invest more. With future bias, the intergenerational redistributive effects of public goods stimulate such incentives under certain conditions. Hence, the government size affects the economic growth through intertemporal changes in their resource allocations. Moreover, the growth effect of the government size provides nontrivial outcomes of welfare analysis. Our numerical analyses show the growth and welfare superiority of the democratic governments to the nonbiased social planner.