This article is a study of the long-term growth of public expenditure. Starting from the hypothesis that the public budget always has a strong redistributive content, the authors aim to verify the influence of different types of redistributive policies (such as vertical and horizontal) on public expenditure evolution. Two alternative sets of redistributive policies (vertical bottom-up and fragmented horizontal) form the basis for the building of two models which are then tested with reference to long-term Italian public expenditure evolution.
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