What to make of a very high ratio of public spending to GDP?

We begin with the extreme case of France: public spending is likely to account for 64% of GDP in 2020. It is important to understand that this means that the government controls the use (public investment, pensions, healthcare, education, housing, family support, labour market spending, security, research) of 64% of national income. Is this a problem? It is a problem if the government spends less efficiently than the private sector . I f the government spends at least as efficiently as the private sector, then the public spending share of GDP can be high. How to know whether the government spends more or less efficiently than the private sector? We can look at whether there is a correlation across OECD countries between the weight of public spending and productivity gains (labour and total factor productivity). We see that a high weight of public spending is not significantly associated with lower productivity gains.