Tax reforms and the growth of government

This paper analyzes alternative approaches to measuring the effects of structural tax changes on government growth. It first reviews traditional time series approaches that attempt to disentangle the causal relationships between taxes and spending. It explains why these methods are incapable of uncovering the true causal links because of problems of observational equivalence and why institutional data can assist in making this determination. It then presents the methods and results from two alternative approaches and studies that analyze the effects of changes in tax structures on government growth. Both methods rely on econometric and institutional analysis.