“Out of Control Spending”? Not So Much

A comment by flipspiceland on a previous post, about Democratic senators and “out of control” spending, got me curious about our spending numbers compared to other large, prosperous countries.

Short story: our governments (fed, state, local) are incredibly frugal compared to the rest of the world. This even with a defense budget that’s larger than every other country’s combined.

Here are the facts on the ground, most recent comparable data I could pull: for 2006. (As you can see, even for that year some countries haven’t reported.)

This is all in national currencies for 2006, no jimmying around with inflation adjustments or exchange rates/purchasing-power parities to convert to U.S. dollars. So the data’s pretty much as straight as you can get it.

Government Spending and GDP
(In National Currencies, 2006)
Government Expenditures GDP Spending as  % of GDP
Korea 251,982,800 908,743,800 28%
Ireland 59,912 176,759 34%
United States 4,795,952 13,336,200 36%
Japan 183,515,800 507,364,800 36%
Spain 377,876 984,284 38%
Canada 568,681 1,449,215 39%
Norway 873,925 2,159,573 40%
Greece 89,980 210,460 43%
United Kingdom 584,779 1,325,795 44%
Germany 1,052,290 2,325,100 45%
Netherlands 246,028 540,216 46%
Portugal 71,944 155,446 46%
Belgium 154,137 318,193 48%
Italy 722,751 1,485,377 49%
Finland 81,343 167,009 49%
Austria 127,194 256,162 50%
Denmark 841,076 1,631,659 52%
France 952,516 1,806,430 53%
Sweden 1,569,579 2,900,790 54%
Australia NA 1,045,674 #VALUE!
New Zealand NA 165,903 #VALUE!
Israel 296,240 NA #VALUE!
Source: stats.oecd.org. Expenditure from National Accounts: General Government Accounts: Government expenditure by function. National currency, current prices. GDP from National Accounts: Gross Domestic Product, Annual, in millions of Current Prices (National Currrency)

Taking just federal government expenditures, we’re even more frugal. (A higher percentage of our government spending is by state and local governments.) Stats.OECD is kind of a pain in the ass because it’s forever expiring your session and losing all your work, so I didn’t pull this myself–found it on another blogger’s site, pulled from CIA data. (CIA, OECD, UN, etc. all ultimately get their data from the same sources–the countries themselves–using standardized metrics.)

Notice the company we’re keeping?

Federal Spending as a Percentage of GDP
13. Sweden    58.1
14. Denmark    58.1
19. Belgium    56.0
20. Norway    55.8
23. Italy    55.3
24. Netherlands    54.7
25. Austria    54.3
26. Finland    54.2
27. Portugal    54.1
34. Greece    50.7
37. UK    50.0
41. Germany    48.8
43. Canada    48.2
47. Spain    47.3
51. New Zealand    46.6
63. Israel    43.6
64. Australia    43.6
69. Ireland    41.5
76. Switzerland    37.8
78. Luxembourg    37.5
103. Japan    30.9
107. South Korea    29.3
137. Taiwan    21.2

143. Chad    19.9
144. US    19.9
145. Cameroon    19.1


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3 responses to ““Out of Control Spending”? Not So Much”

  1. […] Click on this for the full list comparing U.S. spending levels with 18 other countries. […]

  2. Publius Avatar

    Not counting state and local US spending is cheating.

  3. Asymptosis Avatar

    @Publius
    I agree. Our federalist system means that local and state taxes comprise a much larger portion of taxation than in most other countries. That’s why I showed total first, fed-only second.

    But it’s still worth showing the fed-only numbers to counter the “cheating” figures offered up by the right.