Policy Destortions, Size of Government, and Growth

This paper analyzes the structural relationship between policies that distort resource allocation and long-ten growth. It first reviews briefly the Solow model in which steady-state growth depends only on exogenous technological change. Policy distortions do affect the rate of growth in the transition to the steady state in the Solow model. However, growth falls off so rapidly in the Solow transition as to make it unsatisfactory as a model of long-ten growth, even over periods as short as a decade. The paper proposes an increasing returns model in the spirit of the new literature on economic growth. With increasing returns, endogenous economic variables - - and thus policy - - will affect the steady-state rate of growth. The model gives output as a linear function of total capital, but a decreasing function of each of two types of capital. The distortion is defined as a policy intervention that increases the cost of using one of the types of capital. The relationship between this distortion and steady-stste growth is negative but highly nonlinear. At very low levels and very high levels of distortion, the effect on growth of changing the distortion is close to zero. Changes in stru