Abstract
The aim of this article is to help explain the history of the public spending-to-GDP ratio in France by examining the production of laws and regulations. It empirically finds a positive and significant relationship between the number of pages in the Official Gazette of the French Republic and the development of the public expenditure-to-GDP ratio. We rely on the number of pages in the Official Gazette as a proxy for the cost of implementing laws and regulations. If unchecked, a proliferation of laws and regulations expands public spending. Over the period 1905–2015, a 10% increase in pages caused a 1.14% increase in the public expenditure-to-GDP ratio.
Highlights
The aim of the present article is to help understand and explain the history of public spending in France
Some scholars argue that liberal ideology is incapable of explaining the growth, in the long term, of state interventionism and its influence on economic development and, that it ignores the decisive role of the state in economic progress (Bouvier 1978)
We consider the long-run coefficients from the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) reported in Table 4, column (1), which shows that, as expected, PAGES is significant and bears the expected sign
Summary
The aim of the present article is to help understand and explain the history of public spending in France. It was thought that one of the shortcomings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French historiography related to the role of the state in economic development and, more generally, the very history of the state as a governing apparatus or machine (Bouvier 1978; Rosanvallon 1990). A proposed explanation for those shortcomings is the conscious or unconscious domination of the classical liberal approach to capitalism. Some scholars argue that liberal ideology is incapable of explaining the growth, in the long term, of state interventionism and its influence on economic development and, that it ignores the decisive role of the state in economic progress (Bouvier 1978).
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