The size and structure of China’s full-covered fiscal expenditure

China Finance and Economic Review

Table 2 The comparison of fiscal expenditure between China and OECD countries (unit: %)

Expenditures	China1	China 2	US	France	Germany	UK	Japan	Three Nordic countries	Three transition countries
General public service	13.49	11.48	11.7	12.21	12.84	10.56	11.5	12.19	14.14
National defense	5.85	4.98	11.94	3.72	2.32	5.37	2.2	2.93	2.59
Policing	6.63	5.64	5.39	3	3.36	5.18	3.2	2.26	4.19
Economic affairs	22.82	19.41	9.6	6.02	9.89	6.18	9.6	8.13	13.03
Environmental protection	3.33	2.84	-	1.77	1.47	1.99	2.9	0.99	1.68
Housing and community facilities	11.31	9.62	2.34	3.36	1.47	2.58	1.96	1.19	1.69
Healthcare	6.29	9.10	20.84	14.16	14.95	16.33	16.95	14.89	13.10
Culture, sports, and media	2.34	1.99	0.7	2.65	1.68	2.19	0.98	2.64	3.23
Education	17.41	14.81	15.69	10.62	9.05	13.74	8.84	13.42	11.53
Social security and employment	10.53	20.15	21.55	42.65	43.16	35.66	42.26	41.41	34.87

Source: author’s estimation. Data of OECD countries are from OECD (2012). Three Nordic countries were Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Three transition countries are Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The merge data were the simple average of the ratio of fiscal expenditure on GDP.