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Is your government quietly making you poorer?

Cross-country World Bank data consistently shows a negative correlation between government spending as a share of GDP and GDP growth rates. Countries with smaller governments (Singapore ~15%, Bangladesh ~9%) tend to outgrow high-spending peers. The relationship fits a Power Law better than the traditional Quadratic Armey Curve: R²=0.42 vs 0.39 across 113 countries in the 2005–2023 structural sample.