Do more open economies have bigger governments? Another look

We reconsider the evidence of a positive relationship between openness and the size of government recently established by Rodrik [Rodrik, D., 1998. Why do more open economies have bigger governments? Journal of Political Economy 106, 997-1032] and others. While the existing literature focuses on expenditure based measures of government, we consider non-budgetary measures such as government ownership of enterprises, price controls, asset expropriation. Each of these may have little impact on government expenditures, yet can make the role of government sizable. We demonstrate that the scope of government is much larger in less open economies when considering non-budgetary measures. Additionally, we show that higher levels of non-budgetary government are positively correlated with trade barriers. Finally, we provide further evidence on the hypothesis that larger governments provide social insurance in open economies subject to terms of trade shocks. Although we find that greater terms of trade risk is weakly associated with larger government in all forms, these interventions include price controls and greater risk of asset expropriation which are hard to reconcile with a pure insurance motive.