The Impact of Public Expenditure Structure on Economic Growth in Russia

In this paper we estimate the impact of changes in the structure of general government expenditure on GDP growth rate in Russia. We construct two types of models: with expenses as shares of total general government spending and as percentages of GDP. The structural vector autoregression (SVAR) methodology from [Corsetti et al., 2012] has been used. According to our estimates, an increase in the share of productive expenditures (national economy, education and health) has a positive impact on the rate of economic growth, while an increase of the share of non-productive expenditures (national defense and social policy) has a negative effect on the growth rate of GDP. The largest positive effect among productive expenditures belongs to expenditure on the national economy: increasing spending on the national economy by 1% of GDP while maintaining the total expenditure unchanged leads to an increase in GDP growth rate by 1.1 p.p. The second largest effect is produced by expenditure on education: a 1% of GDP increase in this expenditure with constant total spending leads to additional GDP growth of 0.8 p.p. Expenditure on health care has the least positive impact on growth: the effect of its increase is estimated at +0.1 p.p. to GDP growth rate. For defense and social spending the effect is negative: -2.1 p.p. and -0.7 p.p. respectively. The results obtained in this paper are generally consistent with the results in previous empirical studies for Russia based on fiscal multipliers, as well as results in empirical studies with foreign and international data.