The Effect of Federal Government Size on Private Economic Performance in Canada: 1870–2011
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper asks whether government size is complementary to or a substitute for private economic activity and whether that effect is a function of its size. It does so by testing the hypothesis that the growth of federal government size in Canada over the long 1870–2011 period has had an inverted U shape with a tipping point in relation to private output. Its contribution is three fold: first it argues that historical size should be linked to the level rather than the growth rate of private performance; second it incorporates formal controls for endogeneity; and third, nonparametric techniques assess whether the quadratic form most often used to test this hypothesis is appropriate. The empirical work finds the inverted U shape to be consistent with the data for Canada, but only for the 1870–1936 time period. In the post WW2 time period when federal size is above peak size, the data suggest that increases have imposed constant rather than increasing cost. The policy implication is that while government size complemented the growth of the Canadian private economy in its early stages, recent experience is more consistent with the hypothesis that increases in government size have decreased rather than increased private per capita output.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".