The book deals with interrelations between economic growth and public expenditure in India and Tanzania in a comparative framework. Incidentally, public expenditure has not been an exclusive focus of public sector economics, sporadic studies notwithstanding. The book incorporates an innovative approach to public sector economics as it seeks to empirically determine the impact of growth of public expenditure on growth of the economy; the interrelation between these two variables has not been much in focus of research or teaching so far.

The book lucidly explains the conceptual framework of public sector economics as a whole. It delves deep into the political economy of public expenditure with the evolution of the theory and philosophy of states and the different phases and stages of expansion of the roles and functions of public policy in general and public expenditure in particular in economic and social affairs of the nations. Thus, the book goes beyond the narrow confines of political and economic theories and furnishes an inter-disciplinary framework of analysis of the role of public expenditure in growth of economies and welfare of the people.

This is probably the first book which compares the growth of public expenditure and its impact on the growth of economies of two developing countries of South East Asia and East Africa. The book imports statistical and econometric methods and models of data analysis which range from simple tools of descriptive statistics to advance and complex econometric time series models. The analytical approach is not the slave of one single method or model which ensures that the results and inferences drawn are conclusive rather than spurious or otiose. The book uses simple and easy to understand language to make it reader friendly.