Publisher:
Helmut-Schmidt-Universität - Universität der Bundeswehr Hamburg, Fächergruppe Volkswirtschaftslehre, Hamburg
Abstract:
Previous studies were plagued with considerable problems when interpreting and empirically analysing Wagner's Law. Therefore, we initially present some kind of "pure theory of government's share" for a two-person society based on the pure theory of public and private goods as originally developed by Samuelson. We show that Wagner's regime of a representative and authoritative individual and collective decision making – la Samuelson imply different government shares in GNP, though, in principle, Wagner's outcome can be generated even in a Samuelsonian context. Generalizing our results to an n-person society, we derive "optimal" government shares by use of various variants of the model, however, with very different distributional consequences.