Finding an Optimal Size of Government

In the 20th century, we were witnesses an unprecedented growth of public expenditure across all the developed countries of the world. With this phenomenon was created a hypothesis about the negative impact of public expenditure on economic growth and in response to it, economists did many studies which tried to verify this negative effect. In the 80ties the first studies which confirmed the negative linear dependence of these two macroeconomic aggregates. It means greater public sector has negative impact to economic growth of countries. In the 90ties the studies which verify the nonlinear dependence of the inverted U-shaped curve with a peak where is the optimal size of public sector. This concept is collectively called "Armey curve" or "BARS curve" and my final thesis deals by this concept and my goal is to introduce BARS concept to Czech readers. It reflects the evolution of public expenditure in the 20th century and describes the theoretical and empirical development of the whole concept until now. It means a hypothesis about the positive benefits of government activities in the economy to a certain point - "optimal point" and the negative after this point. The final thesis also offers custom research on a sample of the Visegrad Four countries in years from 1995 to 2012. The aim of the research is to verify the linear dependence of growth of GDP and the share of public expenditure in GDP and the existence BARS curve and the optimal size of public spending across countries.