Visit of Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nicholas Bulganin to Britain in April 1956

This article examines the visit of Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Nicholas Bulganin to Britain in April 1956. It concludes that the closer acquaintance of the leaders of the USSR and Britain, the establishment of personal ties between them, and the clarification of mutual positions at the uneasy talks in London played a positive role in Soviet-British relations.     

Explaining the growth of government expenditure: Australian government department appropriations since world war two

Political economists have concentrated on explaining the growth of total government expenditure rather than individual governmental institutions. This paper applies four models of governmental behaviour from the public administration and public choice areas to the growth of the major Australian government departments in the period 1947–1979, and provides forecasts of expenditure for the years 1980–1982. The three models are: budgetary incrementalism, based on the auto‐correlation of departmental appropriations; the degree of bureaucratic monopoly power vis‐a‐vis its financial sponsor; a macro model incorporating social, political and economic incentives for governmental expenditure (e.g. unemployment); and a model based on measurements of the demand of the median voter for government services. The results suggest that a simple budgetary incrementalism model, using a first order autoregression provides the best explanation for institutional growth over the past thirty years and the best forecasts.