Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
Abstract
This paper investigates the interaction effects and the causal relationship between government consumption expenditures on goods and services and non-oil gross domestic product for a panel of 9 selected OPEC countries over the period of 1970-2006. In the multivariate framework, three control variables; inflation, openness and oil revenues are used as control variables to avoid the problem of omitted variables bias. Using econometric techniques including panel cointegration, and panel generalized method of moment; three sets of results have been obtained: first, there is a strong evidence of positive bidirectional causality between non-oil economic growth and government size in the short-run; there is a positive unidirectional causality running from non-oil economic growth to government size in the long-run; the results of the strong causality confirm those of the short-run causality. Based on these findings, both Wagner’s law and Keynes view are supported. Second, inflation and oil revenues have negative and significant impacts non-oil economic growth; the impact of openness on non-oil economic growth is statistically insignificant. Third, inflation and openness have negative and significant impacts on government size, while a positive and significant impact is found for oil revenues.
JEL classification: C33, H11, O40
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