Studies of government size usually try to identify the factors that explain what parts of economic activity are brought within the public sector and what parts are left strictly in private hands. Modern governments are now so large that the question of what determines the private/public composition, or privateness, of public expenditure is of comparable importance for understanding the role of government in society. In this paper, we use a model of the composition of public budgets to uncover the importance of electoral competitiveness and other factors in the evolution of the privateness of public expenditure across the Indian states. These states vary widely in their socioeconomic characteristics while sharing a common political heritage based on parliamentary government. New measures of public expenditure on private targetable goods and of electoral competitiveness at the Indian state level accompany the paper along with a primer on Indian public finance accounting practices in an Online Appendix. The empirical analysis shows that the degree of privateness in India’s more developed states falls substantially with greater political competition and with rising incomes, while in the less developed states it responds more weakly to these key factors and in some cases even inversely.

政府规模的研究通常试图找出解释经济活动的哪些部分纳入公共部门以及哪些部分完全由私人掌握的因素。现代政府现在如此之大，是什么决定了私有/公共成分，或私人性的问题公众支出对于理解政府在社会中的作用具有同等重要的意义。在本文中，我们使用公共预算构成模型来揭示选举竞争力和其他因素在整个印度各州公共支出私人性演变中的重要性。这些州的社会经济特征差异很大，同时拥有基于议会政府的共同政治遗产。该文件随附了新的衡量公共目标商品私人支出和印度州一级选举竞争力的方法，并在在线附录中介绍了印度公共财政会计惯例。