Despite optimism about the end of AIDS, the HIV response requires sustained financing into the future. Given flat-lining international aid, countries' willingness and ability to shoulder this responsibility will be central to access to HIV care. This paper examines the potential to expand public HIV financing, and the extent to which governments have been utilising these options. We develop and...

BACKGROUND Is existing provision of health services in Europe affordable during the recession or could cuts damage economic growth? This debate centres on whether government spending has positive or negative effects on economic growth. In this study, we evaluate the economic effects of alternative types of government spending by estimating "fiscal multipliers" (the return on investment for each...

BACKGROUND The amount of resources, particularly prepaid resources, available for health can affect access to health care and health outcomes. Although health spending tends to increase with economic development, tremendous variation exists among health financing systems. Estimates of future spending can be beneficial for policy makers and planners, and can identify financing gaps. In this stud...

We study the effects of government spending by using a structural, large dimensional, dynamic factor model. We find that the government spending shock is non-fundamental for the variables commonly used in the structural VAR literature, so that its impulse response functions cannot be consistently estimated by means of a VAR. Government spending raises both consumption and investment, with no ev...

How big are government spending multipliers? A recent litererature has argued that while government spending multipliers may be small on average, they might be much larger during recessions when there is greater economic slack. However, this simple intuition ignores the significant heterogeneity of spending captured in aggregate GDP. Even if aggregate GDP responds more to fiscal shocks during r...

This paper examines the claim that expansion of the voting franchise has been an important factor in the growth of government. State government spending and state and local spending are explained using a panel of 46 states for 1950-88. Elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests led to higher turnout, particularly among the poor, and a poorer pivotal voter. As predicted, we find that these cha...

To study questions of taxation in the neo-classical growth model, we need to extend it to allow for government spending and taxation. Here we study the simplest possible model, where government spending is an exogenous stochastic process G(s). We assume that this spending is wasted (thrown into the ocean). It would be possible to amend the model to allow for example for the financing of public ...

We examine the effect of a sudden influx of government spending, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), on support for the President’s party. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that stimulus spending had a modest positive effect on Democratic vote share, but only in counties that were already Democratic-leaning. In Republican counties, by contrast, government spen...