Public Expenditure in Practice: The British Experience

Abstract

There are identifiable and distinct phases in the growth of public expenditure, which can be traced from the late 1780s when the government's budget, in its modern form, was first introduced. The landmarks are associated with political, social and economic events such as the following: (a) Development of administration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late eighteenth century and for the greater part of the nineteenth century public expenditure was largely of an administrative and judicial nature and increased as a result of development of the apparatus of the state. (b) The First and Second World Wars during the twentieth century. Wars had been a major contributory factor to the growth of public expenditure in the UK. The cost of financing the Napoleonic wars led to the imposition for the first time of income tax but it was the two World Wars that pushed public expenditure to unprecedented levels, as the figures in Table 5.1 illustrate.