Growth and welfare: distorting versus non-distorting taxes

Abstract

Some concepts associated with the notion of public consumption could be considered as wasteful public expenditures, so that a firstbest analysis would set their level equal to zero every period. However, their ratio to output is significant and rather stable over time in actual economies. In an endogenous growth framework similar to Barro (1990), we analytically characterize the dependence of a secondbest public investment policy on wasteful public consumption. We compare two extreme tax systems: a distorting system and a nondistorting one. The presence of wasteful expenditures affect optimal public investment and the optimal public financing mechanism. Since private agents do not internalize the fact that by raising their capital accumulation they could be generating extra public investment and consumption, financing public expenditures through lump-sum taxes might lead to an excessive crowding-out impact on current consumption, which may sharply reduce welfare in the short-run as well as limit public capital accumulation and long-run growth. It turns out that this effect can be more damaging for growth and welfare than the disincentive created on private capital accumulation when taxing capital income.