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Despite a renewed interest in the origins of national income accounting, and increasing scholarship on the relationship this has to the State, there is further scope for us to better understand the context of how this came about. We do not fully understand how institutional factors shaped them or what the numbers themselves meant to the researchers. This thesis adopts a historical approach informed by the works of Geoffrey Hodgson and Quentin Skinner to better understand a critical juncture in national accounts transformation – the 1941 publication of White Paper Command Paper 6261 An analysis of War Finance and an Estimate of National Income and Expenditure – and how it was influenced by wider intellectual and institutional changes from the 1930s. The thesis is organised in two parts. In the first part, the Moments of National Accounts, Chapter 3 argues that 1930s economics drew on heroic figures from the distant past to justify new approaches to economics. Chapter 4 zooms out to consider the influence of international bodies such as the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation during the 1930s upon a new data-driven, “realistic” approach to economics. Chapter 5 looks at how wider pressures for new wartime finance approaches justified new technocratic approaches which led to the publication of the first official national accounts. The second part, the Movements for National Accounts, examines the institutionalisation of this new technocratic national accounting approach through two case studies. Chapter 5 considers the way Keynes and Stone founded the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge as a research centre for furthering a “realistic” research agenda. Chapter 6 examines a confluence of interests between the Colonial Office’s desire to export national accounts public finance, the researchers of the DAE and the colonial government of Nigeria led to the publication of the National Accounts of Nigeria in 1951. The contribution of the thesis is twofold: 1) showing how context matters to the idea of National Accounts culminating in the 1941 publication; and 2) showing why and how ideas became institutionalised after World War II. By unpacking both, this thesis shows how different bases of thought, rationale and contextual factors informed what National Accounts became in the UK, importantly, in ways that differ from thinking about National Accounts today.

Social spending is a large and controversial program within the United States. Though a number of studies examined its effects on Gross Domestic Product (“GDP”) between countries, very few specifically looked at its effectiveness solely within the United States. By doing so, international political policy deviations are controlled for. Further, most studies neglect the externalities of social spending on living standards. This paper fills these gaps by utilizing two US Census aid datasets – state & local spending and federal aid & transfer payments – for all 50 states to study the effects of social spending on Gross Domestic Product, Income, and Personal Consumption Expenditures Using two-stage residual inclusion estimation, the analysis first predicts social spending variables using its lags and Gross Domestic Product, Income, or Personal Consumption. In the second stage, the first-stage residuals predict Gross Domestic Product, Income, or Personal Consumption. Using this method, the short-term positive marginal benefits were found for Housing (≈$12 on GDP and income), Incapacity (≈$3 on income), Workers’ Compensation (≈$31 on GDP and income) and Other (≈$1.75 on income and personal consumption) spending. Negative effects were found to varying degrees on GDP, income and personal consumption for Family, Health, Labor, Unemployment and Old Age spending. Most variables were consistent between the two datasets and with prior studies. However, differences in the direction from prior studies of the effect on Gross Domestic Product arose for Health, Old Age and Unemployment. Additionally, this paper looks into the interplay of politics with social spending. In particular, how particular years, the political party and gubernatorial turnover are related to social spending and its effects on both the economy and standards of living. Both Labor and Welfare spending show strong influences from political policies.

In this paper, the author uses country-level educational enrollment data parceled into primary-, secondary-, and tertiary-attainment, to delineate connections with specific development outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. The analyses are conducted using OLS Regression to assess education’s impact on total fertility rate, HIV prevalence, under-five mortality rate, life expectancy, GDP per capita growth rate, and the proportion of women in parliament. The author found that the levels of educational attainment have differentiated impacts on the development outcomes tested with secondary attainment having the strongest relationship to the total fertility rate while tertiary attainment has the strongest relationship of the attainment variables to under five mortality rate, HIV prevalence, and life expectancy. These results provide information for policy-makers looking to improve various indicators of wellbeing in their country.

Government expenditures have a close relationship with the gross domestic product (GDP). Understanding the contribution of different expenditures to GDP and improving the efficiency of the fiscal policy is really important for a country's development. The Rahn Curve theory, Rahn, R. and Fox, H. (1996), suggests that there is a level of government spending that can maximize the economic growth. Insufficient spending or over spending will hold back the economy. The main purpose of this report is through analysis of the impact of government spending during the financial crisis to determine how and why different spending levels affect the economy. The data we analyzed include the GSP (Gross state product) and the composition of the expenditures in each state in United States, for the year 2009. We use multiple linear regression to build our model and use stepwise method to select the variables to include. The result shows that pension, education and transportation have a significant positive effect on GSP. This indicates that the expenditure of pension, education and transportation play the important role in the US economy, especially in the recession period. Consequently, instead of increasing the welfare spending, which may reduce people’s motivation to work and hardly stimulates the economy, this paper recommends more allocation of expenditures to the services which can stimulate the economy and create more job opportunities, such as pension, education and transportation. In particular, depending on the survey Diana G. Carew and Dr. Michael Mandel reference have conducted, transportation, which is invested in less than its actual importance and contribution to the economy in the last decade, should get more attentions form the policy makers.