Governomics: Can we afford small government?

By Ian McAuley and Miriam Lyons

People have good reason to demand decent public education and a well-funded health system, to yearn for an economy that doesn't trash the environment or for a smaller gap between rich and poor. Almost without exception, sound economics is on their side.

We've grown used to public debates that pit people and the planet against an abstract, distorted image of 'the economy', but it doesn’t have to be this way. Governomics shows that an emaciated state is bad for business, and that standing up for government means standing up for a public sector that truly serves the public.

'Everybody knows governments are wasteful, incompetent and a drag on the economy. But if you're not sure that's true, read this book.' Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age

'Governomics shows that a market economy can only work when sustained by a strong and active public sector. It will inject some much-needed economic sanity into conversations on the role of government in Australia.' John Quiggin, Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow, University of Queensland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522867664

Book preview

For most of his life Ian McAuley has lived and breathed public policy. He has been an engineer in a manufacturing firm (in the days when we had a home-grown manufacturing sector), a trade commissioner, a policy analyst and a manager in the federal Department of Industry, and more recently a lecturer in Public Sector Financial Management at the University of Canberra. He has worked on consultancies for Australian and foreign governments and for international agencies (the UN and the OECD). He is a regular contributor on public policy issues to The Conversation and New Matilda.

Miriam Lyons is an Australian policy analyst, writer and commentator. She was co-founder and executive director of the Centre for Policy Development, a public-interest think-tank. She has been a regular guest on the ABC shows Q&A and The Drum, has contributed to several media outlets and co-edited the books Pushing Our Luck and More Than Luck. Earlier roles include policy editing for New Matilda, researching freedom of speech in East Timor, and organising ideas festivals.

Together they have worked on public policy issues through the Centre for Policy Development.

GOVERNOMICS

CAN WE AFFORD SMALL GOVERNMENT?

IAN McAULEY AND MIRIAM LYONS

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2015

Text © Ian McAuley and Miriam Lyons, 2015

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover design by Josh Durham, Design By Committee

Typeset by J&M Typesetting

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

McAuley, Ian A., author.

Governomics/Ian McAuley and Miriam Lyons.

9780522867657 (paperback)

9780522867664 (ebook)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Finance, Public—Australia.

Australia—Economic conditions.

Australia—Economic policy.

Lyons, Miriam, author.

336.94

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures

1  The Quiet Achiever

2  Does Size Count? Or is it about Quality?

3  Australians and Government: Wanted but Not Trusted

4  The Invisible Hand and its Limits

5  Government: The Visible Hand

6  Stabilisation: The Steadying Hand

7  Distribution: The Hand that Shares

8  Allocation: The Guiding Hand

9  Allocation: Public Goods—From Bush Tracks to Broadband

10  Allocation: Natural Monopolies—Governments Do Best

11  Allocation: Structural Policy—Shaping the Economy

12  Allocation: Health and Education—Holding Society Together

13  Paying for Civilisation

14  Government as Custodian of the Common Wealth

15  Government Can Deliver if We Let it

16  Beyond Dogma: Reclaiming the Public Good

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

LIST OF TABLES

2.1 Spending and Taxes in High-income OECD Countries, Percentage of GDP—Average over 2002–11

3.1 Attitudes to Government 2013

9.1 Types of Roads by Market Structures

9.2 Engineers Australia National Report Card 2010

11.1 Selected Structural Indicators: Australia and Other Countries

13.1 Australian Taxation Revenue 2012–13 $bn

LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 Economic Growth and Taxes in High-income OECD Countries

3.1 Government Recurrent Outlays as Percentage of GDP 1960–2013

5.1 Composition of Government Outlays 2013–14 $bn

6.1 Commonwealth Cash Receipts and Outlays as Percentage of GDP

9.1 General Government Gross Fixed Capital Formation as Percentage of GDP

12.1 Dependence on Private Insurance and Total Health Expenditure—High-income OECD Countries

13.1 Total Tax Revenue as Percentage of GDP, 2011—High-income OECD Countries

13.2 The ‘Low-tax’ Loop to Economic Decline

1

THE QUIET ACHIEVER

Every year, on the day after Christmas, people crowd the shores of Sydney Harbour to see the yachts setting out on the Sydney to Hobart yacht race.

Although some of the yachts are modest cooperative ventures, the serious contenders are backed by big money. Since 2002, the event has been known as the ‘Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race’, and the boats’ sails and hulls have become floating billboards of corporate names and logos.

Not so prominent is the public infrastructure supporting this venture. The Bureau of Meteorology supplies the all-important weather forecasts. Staff of the Rescue Coordination Centre in Canberra maintain a 24-hour 365-day watch over 53 million square kilometres of ocean. Even less prominent are the civilian and military rescue services on standby.

All these resources were called on in 1998, when on the second day of the race, an intense low pressure cell developed off the southern New South Wales coast.

In the storm six yachtsmen lost their lives and five yachts were abandoned to the seas. In the search and rescue operation, involving defence and civilian personnel, 55 people were plucked from the ocean. Most of these rescues were heroic—helicopter pilots operating at low altitude in a raging storm, and rescuers descending on cables into surging seas to rescue survivors.

Over three days there were 250 aircraft sorties, including navy Sea King helicopters and civilian aircraft, and a navy frigate was brought into the search. While volunteers from the coastal communities made a tremendous contribution, most costs were met from the public purse, some from the defence budget and some from budgets for marine search and rescue.

The commercial sponsors had proven to be strictly fair-weather sailors.

The misfortunes of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart commanded only passing attention outside Australia, but three years later the world was to witness the terrorist attack on New York’s World Trade Center. Nearly 3000 people died when the buildings collapsed. Among the dead were 350 firefighters who were going into the buildings while the occupants were fleeing. Similarly, police commonly put themselves into situations that most private security guards would avoid—situations involving personal physical danger. In Kings Park, Canberra, across the lake from the capital area mall, a memorial with a small bronze plaque holds the name of more than 700 police officers who have died on duty since 1803.

These examples of extreme service do not include the sacrifices and dedication of military personnel. It is easy to forget that we require our soldiers to perform duties that most private employers would not contemplate.

Heroic acts by military forces, police and emergency service workers grab public attention, but in our day-to-day lives the public sector operates with far less visibility, and, fortunately, with far less danger.

We drive on public roads and use public transport. We send our children to school, and whether it is a private or state school, much of its funding comes from governments. We use publicly funded health services. We play with our children in the local park, or take holidays in a national park. These services become part of everyday life.

We are unaware of services operating in the background, particularly regulatory services. When we buy food at a supermarket, café or restaurant we are reasonably confident that it is correctly labelled and safe to consume. When we buy a house we rely on government agencies to confirm that our block of land has been properly surveyed and that our title is secure. When we invest our savings in a bank, in the share market or in a superannuation fund, we are assured that these markets are regulated to protect our interests. When we travel by air we know that the aviation industry is subject to rigorous safety standards and that our flight is directed by an air traffic control system.

Even more in the background are services such as border security, including quarantine services: we become aware of them only as we pass through an airport on a trip abroad or when the media draws our attention to a boat of asylum-seekers that has been detected close to our shores. Less noticeable is the routine work of immigration officials who successfully process twenty-eight million passenger movements a year, or of customs officials who inspect 2000 sea containers every week.

We are inclined to forget about the public sector until we find we need it. Even if we have full-cover private health insurance (which in Australia is heavily supported by public funding and regulation) it will almost certainly be a public hospital that treats us in the event of a serious accident. For our routine medical needs we may rely on private clinics and pharmacies, who operate on a leisurely forty-hour week, but when we are injured in a car accident, or suffer a stroke or heart attack, we turn to a 24/7 public casualty department.

Even if we invest our own savings for retirement, in Australia there are generous public subsidies in the form of tax concessions for superannuation, and there is the backstop of the age pension. Many other countries have tax concessions for private saving (such as the 401(k) schemes in the United States) and publicly funded pensions.

On a wider scale, as illustrated in many countries in recent years, it’s the government that is called on to cover massive failures in private financial markets. When we confront risks that the private sector cannot handle (or, in the case of financial crises, that have their roots in the private sector), we rely on governments to pick up the tab.

Progress Is a Joint Venture

Throughout history, in most prosperous democracies, improvements in people’s lives have resulted from a blend of private and public services. When former Harvard University President Derek Bok surveyed policy developments to 1990, he found ‘on the basis of some sixty to seventy specific objectives of importance to most Americans, the United States has made definite progress over the past few decades in the vast majority of cases’.¹ Included in his list are air and water quality, increased public participation in the arts, and several measures of children’s well-being.

We take many improvements in our lives for granted without being aware of government involvement. For example, in 2013 there were just under 1200 road fatalities in Australia—a rate of three a day, or more than 51 per million people over a year. Only thirty-two years earlier, in 1981, the rate was 223 fatalities per million—more than four times the 2013 rate.² Had Australia’s 1981 fatality rate been sustained there would have been another 4000 lives lost in 2013. Much of that improvement comes from safer vehicles, supported by government regulation. Some comes from better roads, mainly publicly funded, some from stricter enforcement of speed limits and drink-driving standards, some from public campaigns and some from individual behaviour change. Credit goes to both the private and public sectors—to the private sector for building safer vehicles (while reducing prices) and for constructing better roads under contract to government agencies, and to the public sector for developing and enforcing safety standards, policing, planning and appropriating road funding.

Figures on public health tell a similar story. At the beginning of the twentieth century the infant mortality rate in Australia was around a hundred deaths per thousand live births. Now the rate is four per thousand live births, and is still falling.³ As with road fatalities credit goes to many parties. In reality it is meaningless to assign responsibility too sharply—is a private gynaecologist working under contract in a public hospital in the private or public sector? Where do we assign a medical researcher working in the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, an organisation funded by governments, corporations and individuals?

These are the stories of ‘mixed economies’, where both the private and public sectors contribute to economic success, but they are stories you rarely hear. Governments don’t brag about their work—they are quiet achievers—and most of what you hear about government is laden with an ideological bias. The division between the private and public sectors, however, need not be guided by blind ideology favouring one sector over another, but rather by a realistic and logical division of functions.

The Rise of Economic Irrationalism

You have undoubtedly heard that the economy must take priority over concerns for fairness, health, education, and a clean environment. You have probably been told that government is a big unproductive overhead, a leviathan that takes our taxes and gives nothing in return, and that the private sector is always more competent and efficient than the public sector.

Those have been unrelenting messages, particularly in the English-speaking countries, for a generation since the ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s. The most strident supporters of ‘small government’ and privatisation are the parties of the right, such as the Liberal Party in Australia and the Republican Party in the United States, as well as those who claim to speak for business interests, but these same ideas are pushed by parties once considered to be on the left of the political spectrum.⁴

Many politicians parrot Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ line when cutting school and hospital funding, privatising airports, banks and energy utilities, or reducing support to pensioners and the unemployed. They place the economic virtue of ‘small government’ beyond question, elevating it to the status of a self-evident truth.

The political philosophy behind such thinking is variously described as neoliberalism, conservatism or in Australia as economic rationalism, but these names are all misleading. It is not liberal in any traditional sense of the word, because it is pursued with the dogmatic assuredness of a fundamentalist preacher with a bully pulpit. It is not conservative, because it has taken countries, particularly Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, down a radical path of extreme privatisation, quite out of step with the rest of the prosperous world. And it is certainly not rational: it’s just plain bad economics. There are alternatives, and they are well supported by established economic theory and a large body of rigorous research. Governomics presents these alternatives.

People have many good reasons to desire a decent public education system, to dislike privatised toll roads, to want a well-funded health system, to seek effective action on climate change, and to live in a society where there is less disparity between the rich and the poor. What is not always evident is that, almost without exception, sound economics is on their side.

It is easy to lose sight of the economic case for government in the face of those who portray it as an unproductive and wasteful burden on society. For example, in a Fox News program in the United States, commenting on President Obama’s policies, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said:

He does not understand where wealth and jobs come from. It comes from a successful private sector or not at all … government does not create wealth or income. It just shuffles it around and charges a price, a cost for that service or disservice.⁵

The statement raises the question ‘Why is Daniels wasting his life running an enterprise that adds no value?’

In his book The Wrecking Crew, describing the conservative takeover of Washington, Thomas Frank suggests an answer: conservatives deliberately weaken government, thus making room for the private sector. He cites evidence that they view high-performing government as dangerous and act accordingly, actively discrediting its legitimacy in the public eye and discouraging talented people from working in the public service.⁶

This idea that government is intrinsically unproductive is not just American Tea Party hype. In Australia one of the two major political parties states in its platform: ‘We believe … that businesses and individuals—not government—are the true creators of wealth and employment.’⁷

In Australia, as in America, it is always easy for politicians on the campaign trail to claim that they will not raise taxes, or that they will fund tax cuts by making ‘savings’. A much-favoured promise is to cut public service numbers, generally in a vague, general statement—rarely specifying teachers, police, nurses or firefighters as the people likely to lose their jobs.

The belief that government is simply a burdensome overhead was illustrated by a participant in the popular Australian television show Q&A, where the studio audience was invited to put questions to then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. One of the first questioners was a well-dressed lady, peeved about the amount of tax her household was paying.⁸ In complaining about the loss of a health insurance subsidy she said, ‘We slide into the middle-class band whereby we don’t get any subsidies whatsoever. We feel we’re constantly paying out.’

The subsidy to which she was referring had just become means-tested, cutting out at an annual family income of $260 000 a year. That would place her household in the top 3 per cent of incomes. Understandably such households would be liable for a fairly large amount of income tax—at least 30 per cent of income based on tax tables. And they would be outside the scope of any means-tested benefits, the subject of the complaint. But they would still be enjoying the benefits of defence, policing, transport infrastructure, heavily subsidised education and health care (even with top-level private insurance) and a range of other services.

Yet her complaint is unsurprising, both because of the low visibility of many government services and the way we take for granted the services that have been with us for longest. Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University refers to the government in the United States being ‘submerged’, in that many functions of government, sometimes by design, have gone out of sight or ‘underground’.⁹

It is the same in Australia, where government assistance to private education is paid to the schools, and does not always appear as a credit on the parents’ accounts. Some government services, such as home care for the aged, are delivered through non-government agencies, with little sign of government involvement. The well-off receive their generous superannuation subsidies in the discreet form of tax deductions, rather than in the more obvious form of specific social security payments to the poor. There may be good reasons for paying funds directly to schools and for using private agencies to deliver services, but they tend to deprive governments of what those in the private sector call ‘brand recognition’. It’s as if government is conditioned to modesty, like servants in Victorian households whose job was to disappear into the background. Perhaps ‘public servants’ take their job title too literally.

When we do become aware of government services it is more often than not because something has gone wrong in some area in which government is involved. When there are 15 000 admissions to public hospitals every day there are inevitably some newsworthy mistakes. So long as there are any road fatalities there is enough graphic material for television stations and tabloid newspapers: one a day is enough for a steady flow of stories. There is a widespread public belief that crime rates are rising, while all available evidence points in the opposite direction.¹⁰ Perhaps we would have to eliminate crime entirely to overcome the impression that police are not doing their job properly.

There are plenty of anecdotes to reinforce a view that government services are a dismal story of incompetence, waste and laziness. We live in a society with a high level of accountability and scrutiny of public services—a situation that most reasonable people would prefer to the alternative of corruption and cronyism behind a veil of secrecy. But it does tend to bring failures in public services disproportionately to our notice. Failures in the private sector are not so well exposed.

We carry around images of public bureaucrats, shuffling papers or tapping keyboards between coffee breaks, while we forget about the private sector bureaucrats in banks and insurance companies, or the desk-bound clerks in call centres. But in Australia, since 1980, while public administration as a share of the economy has shrunk—from 6 per cent down to 5 per cent of GDP—the share of the finance and insurance sector has doubled—from 4 per cent to 8 per cent of GDP.¹¹ Public servants don’t come within a cooee of appearing in the Business Review Weekly Rich List, and if an expensive car is to be seen in Canberra or Washington it’s a fair bet that the driver or chauffeur-driven passenger is a corporate lobbyist.

We read endless press reports of misdirected government projects, such as the 2009 Home Insulation Program (disparagingly called the ‘pink batts scheme’ in the press), in which a good idea to stimulate the economy to stave off a recession went wrong because of hasty planning and inadequate regulation—in fact a misplaced trust in the private sector.¹² In the same year twenty-eight construction workers, fifteen manufacturing workers, and twenty-six agriculture, fishing and forestry workers died on the job, without sparking royal commissions or calls for the private sector to cease its involvement in those industries.¹³

Governments do not get a good press. In part this is because, with their obligatory openness and accountability, they are easy targets for journalists seeking a story. In part it is because there are commercial interests who stand to gain from a retreat of government—from unethical traders who would welcome less scrutiny from regulators through to toll-road companies that would like to see privatisation of public goods. Columnists pursuing an ideological agenda find it easy to imply that a failure in one government agency proves that something is wrong with government in general. By contrast, financial journalists reporting on poor corporate performances may make generalisations about a specific industry sector, but would never suggest that they reveal a systemic problem in the private sector as a whole.

There are more mundane reasons government achievements don’t hit the headlines. Governments are involved in mature industries that lack the pizzazz of emerging industries such as those based on cloud computing and mobile apps (although governments have often been early adopters of innovations, and it is easy to forget that the internet itself emerged from a US Government National Science Program initiative). Improvements in areas like public health are steady and incremental. And of course there is the enduring problem that government agencies, on the whole, do not project themselves well, and have adopted management practices that do not necessarily endear themselves to the taxpaying public.

A Role for Government

‘The hard jobs are left to the public sector’ said Herman Leonard, Professor of Public Management at Harvard University. He was referring not only to physically dangerous tasks, but also to those functions that private markets find too hard or unprofitable. Marine rescue, national defence, firefighting, provision of roads, education, public health, welfare and many other activities have traditionally fallen to the public sector.

These jobs are hard because in many cases the private sector doesn’t have any incentive to do them, and in other cases it would not necessarily do them well. This book is about those hard jobs.

Highlighting the economic role of government does not mean advocating ‘bigger government’—indeed, governments do many things that perhaps should be left to the private or community sectors. Without a strong set of principles guiding the appropriate division of labour between the public and private sectors, governments are drawn by political pressure into dubious ventures with little if any public value. There are too many unmet needs in education, infrastructure and other areas where public funding is justified to allow governments to waste public money on handouts for chocolate factories, health insurers, commercial football stadiums or an aero club where a minister happens to park his private plane—to illustrate a few economically unjustified outlays of recent times.

But at the same time there are many things governments should be doing that they have palmed off to the private sector through privatisation or by neglecting to intervene when necessary. These include services such as health insurance and the provision of transport, water and power infrastructure. These are areas where, even if private companies operate ethically and to the best of their ability, they are likely to fall short on economic efficiency and equity. When governments provide these services they may do so with a little less fanfare than private companies, but they can achieve better outcomes at lower cost.

Without a well-functioning public sector, we run the risk of private affluence contrasting with public squalor, to use the words of JK Galbraith.¹⁴ It may be great to have a new BMW in the garage, but is it worth it if the roads are crumbling and we are caught in a daily two-hour commute because there is no decent public transport? We may have the latest high-tech hiking boots, backpacks and tents, but what’s the point if all wilderness areas have been sold to the private sector for development? Do we want to live imprisoned in a gated community because life outside is too ugly, dangerous and unhealthy?

Now that we have gone so far down the ‘small government’ path, many people are looking for practical guidance on how to restore a sensible balance.

About Governomics

The language of economics—the dominant language of modern politics—is a tool citizens can use to prise open the doors of power and take their rightful place at the centre of conversations about the future. This book outlines the economic role of government in what we hope is an accessible way. (If you’re looking for an economics text with diagrams, equations and specialised jargon you’ll find it in another part of the bookshop.) This is the stream of economics that traditionally underpins the mixed economy, where markets, governments and civic society all contribute to our prosperity.

We show that it makes good economic sense for governments to invest in health and education, to provide transport infrastructure, to protect natural resources, to see that the benefits of economic activity are distributed fairly, and so on.

While we focus on the economic dimension we are well aware of the wider responsibilities of government—to preserve civil liberties, to provide for public order and safety, to protect the weak from the powerful—but those are beyond the scope of this work (even though many of these functions also have an economic dimension). Likewise, by pointing out the economic value of the non-market sphere, we are by no means arguing that everything should be treated in the same way as products on a supermarket shelf. A world in which everything of value was traded would be a dystopian world indeed. Even the widest economic lens will be blind to some important aspects of a complex world. Psychology, sociology, engineering, environmental science—all have different and equally useful tools to use when attempting to understand and solve social problems.

We want to show where economics fits, or should fit, into public policy. There are massive social consequences when governments get economic policy wrong: from the depressions and wars of the last century to the growing inequality in places that once celebrated their egalitarianism. In several countries, including Australia and the United States, the link between economic contribution and reward is now almost completely severed.

The idea that citizens are faced with a choice between economic and social outcomes, implicit in much public debate, is bunkum. There’s no point in economic activity that does not in some way contribute to individual and collective well-being now or in the future. Of course people want well-paid work, to feel useful and productive and to have the material means to lead a full life. When these conditions are met economic indicators such as GDP, employment and inflation will probably look positive, but the purpose of life isn’t to produce impressive economic indicators.

The other supposed trade-off is between economic and environmental objectives, a trade-off assumed in Australia’s arguments about climate change policy, as if it is possible to choose between a safe climate and economic prosperity. That too is bunkum. Economics is about ensuring scarce resources are put to their socially best use, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that the capacity of our ecosystems to support human life is a crucial and over-exploited resource. We may not be able to predict the exact consequences of two or five degrees of warming, for example, but most rigorous projections show that it would be costly in the extreme.

Our economic case against the ‘small government’ obsession is based largely on the cost of pushing the private sector into areas where it cannot serve our needs as well as governments can. It may well be possible to get private companies to build and own toll roads, but it’s far less costly for the government to own transport infrastructure. Health care can be funded through private insurance, but at a tremendously high cost, and with a loss of the equity and efficiency of a single public insurer. Private charity and community organisations can provide some collective services, but they should not be expected to do the heavy lifting done by government. Politicians are apt to claim that governments cannot afford to go on funding certain services, but they don’t point out that saving a dollar in tax often comes at the cost of having to pay more than a dollar—often much more than a dollar—for the supposed benefits of having these services provided by private companies.

In standing up for government we are standing up for good government, efficient and responsive to society’s needs. We have found no evidence to support the stereotypes of public servants as long-lunching pen-pushers, but there are no excuses for failing to hold governments to the highest standards of performance. Of course some government ventures fail, but so too do many private sector ventures. Failure is a price paid for economic dynamism. Government undertakings should be models of efficiency, innovation and good management—places where people with energy and creativity want to make their contributions to the public purpose.

While we present the general case for public services, we draw particular attention to two economic problems that call for urgent public attention—growing inequality and climate change. Our concerns echo those coming from the traditional guardians of capitalism, including the OECD, the IMF and the Bank of England, as well as prominent economists of various ideological persuasions. They point out that effective policy must deal with these problems if the economic systems that have brought prosperity to the world over the last two hundred years are to survive.

There is an economic case for government. The market is not the sole source of prosperity. Governments and markets complement each other, and our well-being rests on an appropriate mix, where markets and governments each do what they do best and where there is a thriving civil society.

Over the last thirty years, however, politicians, business lobbyists and many journalists have been singing the virtues of ‘small government’. They tell us that the only way to bring down the budget deficit is by cutting services rather than by increasing taxes, that burdensome regulations stifle enterprise, and that welfare programs discourage people from working. But is there any evidence that the ‘size’ of government, whatever that may mean, sways a country’s economic fortunes?

2

DOES SIZE COUNT? OR IS IT ABOUT QUALITY?

According to The Centre for Independent Studies, 10 April 2014 was ‘Tax Freedom Day’. Every year, the conservative Australian think tank calculates ‘the first day of the calendar year