Theory, ideology and public expenditure control : issues in the identification of government presence and the problems of "big" government

Abstract

The major concerns of this thesis are two fold. The first is to draw attention to the problems and difficulties involved in the identification of the scale of government, that is, ‘government presence’. Many of these difficulties arise because the scale of government is not always understood in the literature as an organisational phenomenon. For example, in most discussions on government growth, government is often represented, or indicated, as a quantity in terms of the programs it produces or the resources it uses and allocates, notably public expenditure. The second concern, which follows directly from the first, is that efforts to reduce the scale of government influence which concentrate on measures to reduce public expenditure will be generally unsuccessful or give rise to distortions and inefficiencies in public sector activity.

Date of Award	1984
Original language	English