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Public spending is often a contentious subject because different political
parties have different agendas as to what should be the current national
priorities. Of course, the same is true for the public in general. It is
thus of interest to determine whether public spending is indeed as biased
and capricious as it is often perceived, or whether there nevertheless
exist some fundamental principles that guide it. We use data from the
Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia,
detailing every transfer of public money to the private sector from
January 2003 to May 2020. During this time Slovenia has done business with
no less than 248,989 companies. We find that the cumulative distribution
of money received per company can be reasonably well explained by means of
a power-law or a log-normal fit. We also show evidence for the first-mover
advantage, and determine that the attachment rate of public spending to
companies over time is roughly linear. These results indicate that
Slovenian public spending is to a large extent guided by self organizing
principles that, against all odds, go beyond nefarious interests
and lobbying.
93 views reported since publication in 2022.