Public debt/Related Articles

Index

See the economics index for an index to topics referred to in the economics articles.

Parent topics

• Economics [r]: The analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. ^[e]
• Microeconomics [r]: A branch of economics that deals with transactions between suppliers and consumers, acting individually or in groups. ^[e]
• Politics [r]: The process by which human beings living in communities make decisions and establish obligatory values for their members. ^[e]

Other related topics

• Debt [r]: The outcome of an agreement between a person or organisation wishing to make immediate use of resources, and one wishing to defer their use. ^[e]
• Fiscal policy [r]: Policy concerning public expenditure, taxation and borrowing and the provision of public goods and services, and their effects upon social conduct, the distribution of wealth and the level of economic activity. ^[e]
• Taxation [r]: The transfer of resources from the community to the government. ^[e]
• Public expenditure [r]: Spending by the public sector ^[e]

Glossary

(for terms not defined below, see the economics glossary [1])

• Automatic stabilisers [r]: the tendency in times of falling economic activity for the government spending to rise, and for tax receipts to fall - and the reverse tendency in times of rising economic activity ^[e]
• Budget deficit [r]: the excess of a government's expenditures over its receipts. See also cyclically-adjusted budget deficit ^[e]
• Crowding out [r]: A fall in private sector investment resulting from an increase in government borrowing. ^[e]
• Debt trap [r]: the situation in which the national debt continues to grow faster than national income so that more and more of the government’s budget has to be devoted to interest payments. ^[e]
• Fiscal adjustment [r]: The change in the primary budget balance required to meet a specified criterion (usually a requirement to return to fiscal sustainability). ^[e]
• Fiscal consolidation [r]: A policy aimed at reducing budget deficits and the national debt. ^[e]
• Fiscal stimulus [r]: a reduction in taxation for the purpose of raising economic output, or an increase in government spending for that purpose. ^[e]
• Fiscal gap [r]: the size of the primary budget surplus (expressed as a percent of GDP) that is required to achieve fiscal sustainability by immediate compliance with the requirement that the national debt be maintained at or below its existing percentage of GDP. ^[e]
• Fiscal policy [r]: Policy concerning public expenditure, taxation and borrowing and the provision of public goods and services, and their effects upon social conduct, the distribution of wealth and the level of economic activity. ^[e]
• Fiscal sustainability [r]: A government's continuing ability to service its debt without unrealistically large future corrections to its balance of income and expenditure. ^[e]
• Generational accounts [r]: accounts that are constructed by extrapolating current policies through the lifetimes of all people currently alive, and by calculating the net taxes they would pay under those policies. The results are sensitive to the method of extrapolation. ^[e]
• Monetisation (of public debt) [r]: A government's sale of its own securities to the country's central bank in order to obtain funds that are used to redeem its public debt - resulting in an expansion of the bank's monetary base, and consequently of the country's money supply. ^[e]
• Money supply [r]: the economy's stock of those assets that can be quickly exchanged for goods and services. ^[e]
• Primary budget deficit [r]: the budget deficit excluding payments of interest on the national debt. ^[e]
• Ricardian equivalence [r]: the argument that government spending will not increase demand because it will prompt taxpayers to save an equivalent amount in anticipation of a resulting tax increase. ^[e]
• Sovereign default [r]: The failure of a government to comply with its interest payment or debt repayment obligations. ^[e]