The nature of 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 or otherwise of Wagner’s Law for the Indonesian economy. The high growth in the sample period 1980-2014 make Indonesia a likely candidate for it. Causality and cointegrating techniques are used. A key finding in our vector-autoregression analysis is unidirectional causality running from GDP and Prices to Government Expenditure supporting Wagner’s Law. In the case of Prices and Government Expenditure there is also 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 Prices are found to be transitory shocks to Government Expenditure and significantly countercyclical with economic activity, suggesting that government expenditure does play a role in economic stabilisation.

In this study, I employ a SVAR method that filters out the business cycle and monetary policy to produce conservative but realistic estimates of fiscal responses and multipliers for Australia that are unavailable in the literature. The expenditure and tax multipliers reach a maximum of 0.73 and 0.54, respectively, but their comparison alternates depending on the time horizon. Using a linear combination of fiscal shocks, I construct conjectural variations to analyse the data dynamics and inform policymaking on ways of restoring economic activity post-Covid-19. Importantly, it is demonstrated that a policy that simultaneously increases expenditure and taxes can serve as both a fiscal stimulus and a debt reduction instrument in the medium run, with dynamics subject to a transitory reverse overshooting. This finding is particularly relevant for policymakers that are adverse to increasing public debt with discretionary fiscal measures.