Macroeconomic Uncertainty & Government Size: Evidence from Selected Developing Countries

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the size of government in selected developing countries. Fluctuations in GDP growth is considered as an indicator of macroeconomic uncertainty and the ratio of government spending to GDP is taken as a proxy for government size. Taking into account that macroeconomic uncertainty can lead to uncertainty in the market; government in seeking economic stability use monetary or fiscal policies which in turn incur costs and result in increased government spending and larger government size. In this paper, using Panel data model in the period 1980-2009 and the General Auto-regression Conditional Heteroskedasticity model (GARCH) we measure the effect of macroeconomic uncertainty on government size. The estimation results of the model show that increased macroeconomic uncertainty led to increase in the government spending and larger government size in the selected countries.