Association between government expenditure and economic growth: metatrend analysis based on text mining

The research study gives a bird’s eye-view of the extant research related to the association between the two macroeconomic variables of Government expenditure and economic growth for the period 2000-2019. A compendium of abstracts from 105 refereed journal manuscripts from databases such as Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, ABDC ranking, Springer, Wiley and Sage were used as the dataset. The journals considered were primarily Scopus indexed journals. For analytical purposes, the study uses text mining techniques. The contribution of this study lies in the longitudinal text analysis of abstracts of research publications and availability of a micro perspective of the related taxonomy especially keeping in mind changing macroeconomic situations ie the global financial crisis etc. Analytical tools include Word cloud visualization, Topic Modeling and frequency trend of the topic over time. The outcome of the study provides a direction in theoretical and empirical research to economists and researchers. It gives a direction to policymakers with regards to the applicability of the association between these two macroeconomic variables and is an enabler for effective economic policy making and ensuring that quality of Government expenditure improves with respect to the growth objective and vice versa. It can help policymakers in designing growth oriented fiscal policy decisions and in setting government expenditure priorities especially during times of global financial crisis and Covid19.