Another way to look at cross-country evidence is to look at the association between tax ratios and, not the level of prosper- ity, but the growth rate of prosperity. There have been a large number of studies about this concept in the last twenty years. Robert Barro of Harvard had an influential study several years back claiming to find that, while holding other determinants of growth constant, low tax rates and low government spending were associated with higher growth. However, there have been several studies since then showing that those empirical findings do not hold up to reasonable changes in the econometric ap- proach he used and the data he.
