Get the Government Expenditure to GDP Ratio for a variety of countries over time from the Global Macro Database (GMDB). The Government Expenditure to GDP Ratio is the ratio of the total amount of money that a government spends on goods and services to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Data comes from the Global Macro Database (GMDB), further information about the variable can be found within https://www.globalmacrodata.com/documentation.html

The ratio is expressed as a decimal fraction (0.3708 for 37.08% of GDP).

Changed in v2.2.0: this used to be returned in percentage points. It is now a decimal fraction, matching every other ratio in the Finance Toolkit.

Also known as: government spending to GDP.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Expenditure to GDP for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Expenditure to GDP in Python

The Expenditure to GDP is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_government_expenditure_to_gdp_ratio as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2015-01-01')

economics.get_government_expenditure_to_gdp_ratio(
    countries=['United States', 'Japan', 'Netherlands'])

Which returns:

  United States Japan Netherlands
2015 0.3503 0.3729 0.4525
2016 0.3533 0.3723 0.4392
2017 0.3519 0.3669 0.4276
2018 0.3535 0.3674 0.4244
2019 0.3581 0.3729 0.421
2020 0.4457 0.4452 0.4781
2021 0.426 0.4244 0.4589
2022 0.3631 0.4184 0.4327
2023 0.3628 0.4116 0.432
2024 0.3753 0.422 0.4416
2025 0.3738 0.3983 0.448
2026 0.374 0.3963 0.4513

Parameters

get_government_expenditure_to_gdp_ratio accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): A list of countries or a single country to include in the results. Defaults to None.
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data. Defaults to 1.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Debt to GDP Government Revenue Revenue to GDP Government Tax Revenue Tax Revenue to GDP Government Expenditure Government Deficit Deficit to GDP Trust in Government Real GDP (USD) Real GDP per Capita Output Gap

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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