A new report from thinktank The New Zealand Initiative into government spending comes with with the headline-grabbing tagline that up to a third of state expenditure is "wasteful".

That calculation is taken from a 2013 report published by the Canadian libertarian thinktank, the Fraser Institute. It used metrics of outcomes in areas like health, education and economic performance to measure what governments achieved for their level of spending.

That report found that South Korea had the lowest government spending per capita.

For the New Zealand Initiative’s report, senior research fellow Bryce Wilkinson used data from . . . . . . >