The Surprising History of Government Growth

style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">There are many people in the financial world and in the US Republican party (and more sotto voce in the German government) who believe that the worldwide explosion in government spending lies behind many of the recent currency crises. Whether or not this is true, the government spending trend is worth studying for its own sake. Far and away the best guide to this trend is a new book by Vito Tanzi, a former economic counsellor of the International Monetary Fund. If anyone claimed to have read the whole of this massive work, I would not believe them. But the beauty of this volume is that you can learn a great deal from sampling almost any handful of pages. And there are few, if any, equations.