I contribute to the literature on the growth of public spending in Western economies with a novel mechanism that ties it to the marketization process, i.e. the substitution of home with market production. I argue that a key contributor to the expansion of social spending is the replacement of family-based transfers with public pensions and other public transfer programs. I provide empirical support for this hypothesis by establishing the long-run relationship between government size and marketization, alongside other established determinants of government spending, in a panel of Western economies. I then illustrate a potential mechanism behind the results with a theoretical model in which, as a result of the productivity advantage of the market over the home sector, family-based intergenerational transfers decline unexpectedly, providing a rationale for government intervention in the form of public pensions with a poverty relief component.

This article aims to shed light on the process and mechanisms through which Asian manufactured goods (Chinese silk and porcelain, among others) were commoditised and how markets for such goods were formed in the Spanish Empire. After the opening of the Manila Galleon route in 1571 supply of and demand for Asian goods grew in the Spanish Empire, but retail means of supply of such goods were scantly developed. The article offers an econometric model which, when applied to data on a sample of probate inventories of elites of Mexico City and Seville, determines the influence of belonging to private, familial global networks in consumer demand expansion for Asian manufactures throughout the Spanish Empire.