Abstract
Fölster and Henrekson [Fölster, S., Henrekson, M., 1999. Growth and the public sector: A critique of the critics. European Journal of Political Economy 15, 337–358] claim that, by addressing a number of econometric problems, they can establish that it is likely that economies with a large public sector grow more slowly than economies with a small public sector. But their regressions are fundamentally flawed. Re-estimating their growth equation using theoretically valid instruments, we find that the growth effect of the public sector is statistically insignificant, and much smaller than the point-estimates that they report. This is consistent with the agnostic conclusion, drawn by us and others, that cross-country growth regressions are unlikely to provide a reliable answer as to whether a large public sector is growth promoting or retarding.
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