STATE AND LOCAL EXPENDITURES 17
a number of other states. On the other hand, the expendi-
tures of Missouri for capital purposes on a per capita basis
increased during the period 1923 through 1925, but de-
creased in the later years, when highway expenditures showed
a considerable decline. In 1925 and 1926 the per capita
expenditures of Missouri for capital purposes were larger
than those of any other state for which data are included in
Table 4. On the same basis, Missouri ranked second in 1927
and eleventh in 1928. The change in the ranking for
Missouri is attributable almost entirely to the decline in
highway expenditures during a period in which the total
capital expenditures in many of the states showed a marked
tendency to increase.
Table 5 shows the percentage distribution of the expen-
ditures data given in Table 3 between maintenance and
capital. Examination of this table indicates that there was
nothing unusual in the Missouri distributions for 1913 and
1918. In both years some states had a larger proportion of
maintenance expenditures to total expenditures than Mis-
souri, while others had a smaller proportion. In 1923 only
one state, Illinois, had a smaller proportion than Missouri.
From 1924 through 1927 Missouri in each year had a smaller
proportion of maintenance expenditures than any other state
in the group. In 1928 Missouri’s expenditures for mainte-
nance were relatively much larger than in the preceding
years. In four of the six years, 1923 to 1928, the maintenance
expenditures of Missouri comprised a smaller percentage of
total expenditures than was the case for any other state in
the group, and for the entire period the proportion for
Missouri was lower than for any other state. For the period,
Missouri’s expenditures for maintenance amounted to 559
of the net total expenditures of the state. The maintenance
expenditures of only one other state in the group, Oklahoma,
amounted to less than 609, of net total expenditures for the
period.
The statistical material presented in this section would not
be complete without considering the functional distribution
of the expenditures of the several states. In Table 6 the
data for the several functions for the six-year period, 1923
through 1928, have been combined. The combined data for
a
