References: Cameron A. Shelton (2007) “The size and composition of government expenditure” Journal of Public Economics, 91 (11–12) Simon Johnson, William Larson, Chris Papageorgiou, Arvind Subramanian.
An import question is why are the series for real GDP per capita are taken from PWT 7.0? These series are constructed to be used in cross-country studies, and they are not suitable for the analyses in the paper. See the paper by Johnson et al. (2009). This is a major flaw of the paper and the choice should be defended by showing that using the ‘standard’ real GDP series’ would give the same results. Or the GDP series, downloaded from World Development Indicators (local currency, constant prices), should be used.