تقسیم کار و رشد دولت

This paper develops a dynamic, general equilibrium model of specialization-driven growth in which private coordination costs are decreasing in public expenditure on physical and institutional infrastructure. The model provides an explicitly economic explanation of the secular rise of government. In addition, endogenous specialization decisions imply the existence of four development stages, characterized by distinct outcomes regarding the division of labor, the role of government and the return to capital. Growth is characterized by capital accumulation, market integration, the division of labor and the growth of government. The effectiveness of government plays a central role in determining whether an economy converges to a high or low level equilibrium.

While it is well known that among industrialized countries government's share of output has risen dramatically over the past century, this stylized fact, known as Wagner's law, has not found its way into the formal literature on economic growth. This omission appears to be due both to the ready availability of arguments that attribute the rise of government to political or socio-economic mechanisms1 and to the tendency of formal, dynamic analysis to focus on the characteristics of the steady state.2 In the steady state, government's share of output is the ratio of two variables with a common growth rate and is, thus, constant by construction. While steady state analysis correctly predicts that government's share of output cannot increase without bound, it does little to explain the US and European experience of a nearly century-long rise of government. This paper suggests an explicitly economic rationale for the secular rise of government by considering the transitional dynamics of a model in which public goods facilitate an ever-finer division of labor. There are a number of reasons public spending might reduce the private cost of coordinating production and exchange activities among specialized economic agents.

The principle aim of this paper has been to develop a formal model of economic growth capable of explaining the secular rise of government. In doing so, it departs from the familiar assumptions that markets function costlessly and that the institutional context within which market transactions occur may be taken as given and relegated to the analytical background. Instead, the model assigns a central place to market and other coordination costs and to the role that government plays as the provider of the physical and institutional infrastructure necessary to coordinate economic activity involving an ever-finer division of labor. Thus, the economic role of government is placed in the foreground, with optimal public spending at each point in time determined endogenously, along with labor specialization, by the structure of the production and coordination cost functions and the capital–labor ratio.