A Review of Wagner’s Law with Disaggregated Data for Spain

Abstract

Wagner’s Law has been widely tested using empirical analysis, yet very few studies have conducted this analysis using disaggregated data over an extended period of time. This study examines the economic classification of public spending (COFOG) in Spain for the period 1958 – 2015. Our findings confirm previous results in the sense that the law is not rejected for public spending as a whole. Furthermore, our results reveal that social aid and current transfers can be considered as luxury goods as their demand grows more than proportionally when income rises. Our findings also confirm the results of other studies in which education, healthcare and social aid all fail to reject Wagner’s Law. The study provides two important contributions to the literature. First, the study considers a substantially long time period to examine the relationship between different categories of public spending and economic growth. This type of analysis has been carried out on occasion for other economies but never for the Spanish case. Second, our study uses the methodology of unit roots and cointegration with structural breaks, representing an innovation in this field.