This paper addresses the impact of productive government expenditure on income inequality using a dataset of 80 countries over the period of 1980–2015. It incorporates the conflicting predictions implied by alternative growth models on this issue. While the neoclassical model suggests that productive government expenditure will reduce long-run income inequality, the corresponding endogenous growth model suggests the opposite. We examine this proposition, by considering both the aggregate Gini coefficient, and the income shares of quintiles. The results obtained using the Gini coefficients provide compelling support for the contrasting impacts of government investment on income inequality, suggested by the underlying theoretical models. These findings are supported, albeit somewhat more weakly by the regressions employing the quintile data. Our general conclusion is that government investment has a mixed effect on income inequality, a conclusion consistent with previous studies.

本文使用 1980 年至 2015 年期间 80 个国家的数据集，探讨了生产性政府支出对收入不平等的影响。它结合了替代增长模型在这个问题上所暗示的相互矛盾的预测。虽然新古典模型表明生产性政府支出将减少长期收入不平等，但相应的内生增长模型表明相反。我们通过考虑总基尼系数和五分之一的收入份额来检验这个命题。使用基尼系数获得的结果为政府投资对收入不平等的对比影响提供了令人信服的支持，这是由基本理论模型提出的。这些发现得到了支持，尽管使用五分位数数据的回归稍微弱一些。