A Replication Study of “Openness, Country Size, and Government Size” (Journal of Public Economics 2009)

Ram (Journal of Public Economics, 93, 213-218, 2009) questions the body of influential research suggesting that there is a negative association between country size and government size, and country size and openness, which may account for the positive association between openness and government size. Using data from the Penn World Table (PWT), he shows that while openness is positively related to government size, fixed-effects estimates show little evidence of the aforementioned negative associations. We replicate Ram’s results using his data set and a newer revised version of the same data set and find that the ensuing government size–openness association is dependent on the version of the PWT data and the composition of the sample. In addition, we find some evidence of a negative association between country size and government size in the larger sample, but there remains no clear association between openness and country size