A Demand-Theoretic Analysis of Public Consumption Priorities in the United Kingdom

Abstract

In the tradition of empirical studies of demand for public expenditure, this article examines the allocation of public consumption expenditures in the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1996. In addition to obtaining estimates of the effects of relative prices, total expenditure, and demographic variables, the results reveal that the constraints of homogeneity and symmetry cannot be rejected. However, the results reject the assumption of exogeneity of total expenditure employed by previous authors, so that it is important to augment the standard empirical specification by an auxiliary equation describing the evolution of the total expenditure conditioning variable. Finally, there is also evidence that some of the relationships studied have not been stable during the sample period.