Research on the public sector has recently experienced another boom as analysts of domestic and international politics have focused on the effects of global economic change on government activity. Much of this research aims at explaining the "size of government" and related outcomes, such as tax competition and tax evasion, the privatization of public enterprises, the size and shape of the welfare state, or the size of shadow economies. How reliable is the data on government revenues and expenditures on which much of this research relies? How can we arrive at more accurate figures? What are the implications of revisions in the data for future research?
The following three research notes concentrate on the Swiss public sector. This focus on Switzerland is by no means a sign of narrow-mindedness of a Swiss political science journal. The main reasons are: (a) there is a growing debate about the accuracy of data for the public sector in Switzerland, the result of which has implications for comparative research worldwide; (b) the unique features of Swiss political institutions have stimulated interesting debates about the impact of political systems on the public sector -these debates have also been of great interest to students of the public sector in other countries, as well as comparative research.
Jan-Eric Lane notes that the OECD has recently engaged in a major revision of its figures for Switzerland. On the basis of these new figures and other data from Swiss sources Lane shows that, contrary to a view entertained for a long time, Switzerland is much closer to the standard West-European "welfare state" than to the Anglo-Saxon "welfare society" in terms of its share of the public sector in GDP. He argues that the Swiss Public Choice school has based one of its key-propositionsthat the peculiar features of Switzerland's political system are responsible for the small size of its public sector -on data that massively underestimate the size of the Swiss public economy. Lane claims that the new data may lead to revisions in comparative research, in which Switzerland's often used to figure as an outliner in Western Europe. Lane also wonders whether the reassessment of Switzerland's public sector size could contribute to explaining slow growth of the Swiss economy in the 1990s. Finally, Lane poses the question why, in Switzerland, low growth rates combine with a large public sector and rather high income inequality.
Hanspeter Kriesi adds to our understanding of public sector size in Switzerland by explaining why Jan-Erik Lane's figures differ substantially from those given by