The empirical relationship between public expenditure and economic growth can be analysed from different viewpoints. This study focuses on the empirical testing of the validity of Wagner’s law for the Indonesian economy. The high economic growth in the sample period of 1980–2014 makes the law likely to be applicable to Indonesia. Causality and cointegration techniques are used. A key finding in our vector autoregression analysis is unidirectional causality running from GDP and price to government expenditure, supporting Wagner’s law. In the case of price and government expenditure, this study also finds evidence of a long-run cointegrating relationship, which appears stable and supports unidirectional causality. The vast majority of the deviations from the equilibrium relationship between government expenditure and price are found to be transitory shocks to government expenditure. Most deviations also appear significantly countercyclical to economic activity, suggesting that government expenditure does play a role in economic stabilisation.

公共支出与经济增长之间的实证关系可以从不同的角度进行分析。本研究侧重于对瓦格纳定律对印度尼西亚经济的有效性进行实证检验。1980-2014 年样本期间的高经济增长使得该法律可能适用于印度尼西亚。使用因果关系和协整技术。我们的向量自回归分析的一个关键发现是从 GDP 和价格到政府支出的单向因果关系，支持瓦格纳定律。在价格和政府支出的情况下，本研究还发现了长期协整关系的证据，这种关系看起来稳定并支持单向因果关系。政府支出与价格之间的平衡关系的绝大多数偏离被发现是对政府支出的短暂冲击。大多数偏差似乎也与经济活动显着反周期，这表明政府支出确实在经济稳定中发挥了作用。