Singapore: “Who will pay for it?” “Where will we find the money?” – The fallacy of the household budget analogy applied to national budgets

Why what you’ve been told about government debt is wrong, why governments do not actually need to tax before they spend and why deficit spending does not need to be financed via public debt issuance. As our understanding of the mechanics of public finance has evolved, the binding constraint to deficit spending isn’t what you think. – Unraveling the fallacy of the household budget analogy applied to national budgets and the deficit myth

by HK Lim

Singapore goes to the polls on 10th July 2020 amidst the global coronavirus pandemic, its 13th general election since independence. The nationally televised General Election political debate on July 1st marked a first for Singapore in terms of both its format as well as in offering voters a glimpse of an actual real-time debate between representatives from the incumbent ruling People’s Action Party and three major opposition parties comprising the Workers’ Party, the Singapore Democratic Party and the Progress Singapore Party (fielding the largest number of opposition candidates this GE) outside of a parliamentary setting. The hour long debate covered a slew of topics ranging from questions on alleviating local unemployment and its effects, to plans for helping small and medium-sized businesses weather this unprecedentedly severe economic downturn, and not forgetting the hot button issue of how we might better improve socioeconomic mobility and enhance educational access in Singapore.

There have already been many interesting commentaries on the debate’s discussions as well as the performance of each candidate. What we hope to focus on with this piece centers on addressing a recurrent theme that underlies much of the policy debate to and fro – discussions of the various policy possibilities invariably end up converging on the question of affordability. That is, how or whether Singapore can afford each policy, or as is often the standard refrain, “who will pay for it” or “where will we find the money?”

Discussions of the various policy possibilities invariably end up converging on the question of affordability. That is, how or whether Singapore can afford each policy, or as is often the standard refrain, “who will pay for it” or “where will we find the money?”

To set the context for disassembling this oft utilised policy feasibility spending deflator (pun intended), Singapore’s policymakers have long prided themselves on fiscal prudence and have been very careful in ensuring (and emphasizing) that national budget surpluses must always be the de facto modus operandi except under extenuating economic circumstances. One key argument used to justify this position has been a repeated emphasis on the importance of continually building Singapore’s national reserves in preparation for those “rainy days.”

On equal footing has also been the argument that appeals to the supposed “inescapable” logic of the household budget (constraint) analogy applied to national budgets, in justifying the necessity of spending within a country’s “means” and keeping national budgets in surplus (or at the very least balanced over each 5-year term of government). Veering away from such prudence, the electorate is cautioned, will necessitate the raising of future taxes to claw back today’s deficit spending (with the added implication of placing the burden of today’s spending squarely on future generations). [This latter point also implies an acceptance (if not resignation) on the policy front of the notion of fiscal ineffectiveness that harkens back to long-standing debates on the inefficacy of discretionary fiscal policy a la Barro-Ricardian equivalence (Barro 1974), see section II below for more discussion on this.]

Deficit bogeymen and constitutional requirements aside, the real question here is whether Singapore’s policymakers are actually being (hemmed in and thus) too cautious with regards to fiscal spending. Is there more fiscal spending room for countercyclical discretionary fiscal spending to cushion the economic impact of severe downturns? Is there more room for a higher level of general social spending (as a percentage of GDP) particularly that which directly impacts the populace for example via increased education or health spending even during more normal economic times? The answer to these questions is a resounding yes.

Is there more fiscal spending room for countercyclical discretionary fiscal spending to cushion the economic impact of severe downturns? Is there more room for a higher level of general social spending (as a percentage of GDP) particularly that which directly impacts the populace for example via increased education or health spending even during more normal economic times? The answer to these questions is a resounding yes.

This piece will focus on a high level discussion on why this is indeed possible, with particular emphasis on examining why the household budget analogy applied to sovereign currency issuing nation states is actually misguided. With Singapore’s ample fiscal headroom, a significantly higher level of public spending is easily achievable without the many attendant risks that fiscal hawks have trumpeted and such spending can offer the possibility of generating much better medium and longer-term economic outcomes for Singapore.

The arguments for this are nuanced, and to be fair, many well-informed people with the requisite formal training and experience in economics often get this aspect of deficits wrong too. You won’t find this reasoning discussed in most conventional university economics curricula and certainly not within the majority of mainstream economic programs. In reality, the household budget (constraint) analogy applied to nation states is largely assumed to hold by assumption and without (adequate, if any) clarification of (or attempts to understand or illuminate how) varying individual national circumstances might offer departures from this standard view.

Much of the resistance to shifting mainstream economic perspectives on this issue is as much tied to groupthink within the discipline as well as to the ideological hold that dominant schools of economic thought have over what constitutes the mainstream economics position on such questions. As Keynes once said, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

We will explore this non-standard view on public finance in two stages, first through the lens of more conventional approaches to government debt (and public finance) sustainability before turning to a broader discussion of why the generally accepted view of how public finance works in a sovereign currency issuing nation state is fundamentally wrong.

I. Why what you’ve been told about government debt is wrong

The conventional view on public debt and government deficit sustainability goes loosely as follows. Since government debt is finite and there is an absolute limit to the amount of debt that a government can issue, if that limit is exceeded, the government can default. This view is tied to the idea that deficit spending must typically be financed by government debt issuance, and since debt will by definition then correspond to the accumulated deficits of all past years, running persistent deficits means that at some point in the future, there will possibly be a default trigger that precipitates a government default.

The supposed “prevailing wisdom” here has been that governments must always observe fiscal discipline and eschew deficits at all costs.

Because of this widespread belief that high public debt is so dangerous, politicians and policymakers have almost always placed a higher priority to closing public deficits (viz Austerity in the UK) than to restoring economies badly affected by economic and financial crisis via increased public spending programs.

A recent IMF working paper [1] has cast serious doubt on the entire basis for this austerity-based, fiscal sustainability mantra. As it turns out, far from government default becoming inevitable, if public debt rises to too high a level, it may never even actually happen. To go even further, for advanced economies in good standing, a government’s debt capacity appears for all intents and purposes to be infinite. Before getting away with ourselves, let us clarify what this actually means. For an individual country, public debt is indefinitely sustainable if the interest rate on the public debt is less than or equal to the growth rate of nominal gross domestic product (NGDP).

“For an individual country, public debt is indefinitely sustainable if the interest rate on the public debt is less than or equal to the growth rate of nominal gross domestic product (NGDP).”

The key to this condition lies in the affordability of debt. Government debt burdens are typically quoted as the ratio of debt to GDP, and debt sustainability models usually presume that governments run a primary surplus (equal to the excess of government income over spending and before interest costs) that will be sufficient to redeem all such debt over some prescribed finite time horizon.

In reality, governments in good standing don’t generally repay all debt but rather refinance the debt (especially if prevailing interest rates are favorable).

So what really matters at the heart of this talk of debt sustainability is actually the debt service burden. To be sustainable, debt interest must be comfortably payable from current government income (via taxes, duties etc, which are tied to NGDP). This directly translates to the above requirement that the interest rate on the public debt must be less than or equal to the growth rate of NGDP, as a direct mathematical consequence of the debt servicing constraint.

With this consideration in mind, in practice, governments will forseeably have real limits on debt issuance, but these limits will not primarily stem from affordability constraints. In fact, such limits will more likely arise primarily from the rollover risk at debt maturity. So here, a crucial point becomes clear, the term-structure of government debt matters. What this implies is that governments issuing large amounts of public debt would be prudent to lengthen the maturity profiles of their debt portfolios and to also stagger the tranches of public debt in terms of when they are called due. (Such a strategy is also wholly consistent with Singapore’s efforts to grow a deep and well-developed domestic bond market.) Together, all these considerations completely undermine the hitherto “prevailing wisdom” of those repeatedly calling for austerity-like fiscal prudence within the public finance sphere and argue that sustained budget deficits are dangerous under the unjustified guise of fiscal sustainability.

We also note (with irony) that a good undergraduate macroeconomics course would have introduced students to these basic calculations of intertemporal debt sustainability and even beginning students in economics would have drawn similar conclusions from a cursory analysis. Nevertheless, the big difference here between the prevailing mainstream view on public debt sustainability and the enlightened view we just discussed is that instead of a continuous rollover of debt, typical public finance models assume public debt is repaid within some finite horizon even when this isn’t typically the case. [Of course, there are deeper ideological reasons for incorporating this latter assumption (as a somewhat circular justification for austerity) quite unrelated to the calculus of debt sustainability in practice.]

II. Why governments do not actually need to tax before they spend and why deficit spending does not need to be financed via public debt

The 3 parables of deficit financing

Following on from the previous discussion that sought to clarify the conditions for public debt sustainability by re-framing the analysis in terms of debt affordability (based off the observation that most pubic debt is typically rolled over and refinanced at maturity), we now turn to an even more fundamental analysis of deficit sustainability that focuses on the mechanics of public finance. For context, the traditional public finance perspective is centered on the view that national budget deficits are financed via one (or some combination) of three ways: 1) taxation, 2) public sector debt/borrowing 3) printing money. Without going into all the nitty gritty arguments regarding the feasibility of each of these channels, let us quickly discuss each of them in turn.

For deficit financing via taxation, a recurrent sticking point lies in the (mistaken) notion that today’s deficits have to eventually be paid for in the future (or by future generations), and any fiscal transfers to the public today would result in these transfers being commuted instead to savings by recipients in anticipation of their claw back in the form of higher future taxes as per Barro-Ricardian equivalence. This view argues that consumers offset part or all of their extra dollars in hand with increased savings thus defeating attempts at a fiscal expansion. This, it has been argued greatly reduces the effects of the expansionary fiscal multiplier, and neuters it completely if Barro-Ricardian equivalence holds.

It’s worth noting that the discretionary fiscal policy inefficacy tied to Barro-Ricardian equivalence-like behavioral responses of the populace depends on rather strong assumptions, namely that families act as infinitely lived dynasties because of inter-generational altruism (possessing infinite overlapping generation utility functions), the presence of perfect capital markets, and lastly that government expenditures follow a fixed trajectory. And even if Barro-Ricardian equivalence held, it does not imply that countercyclical discretionary fiscal efforts will fail, but rather it outlines the necessary conditions for the failure or success of any such efforts. If anything, the responsibility of breaking free from this straitjacketed notion of policy inefficacy lies with policymakers who have accepted this narrative. Its use here to argue against countercyclical fiscal spending is, if anything, a failure of the policy imagination.

“If anything, the responsibility of breaking free from this straitjacketed notion of policy inefficacy lies with policymakers who have accepted this narrative. Its use here to argue against countercyclical fiscal spending is, if anything, a failure of the policy imagination”

Another criticism of deficit spending via taxes on tax feasibility grounds focuses on the argument that governments need to tax before they can spend. This is incorrect, and in fact the very notion that present fiscal spending has to be clawed back at some future time (whether implied or explicitly alluded to in the process of dismissing policy proposals solely on affordability grounds) undermines this very argument. Taxes do a lot of things, but providing the government with the money it needs in order to spend isn’t necessarily one of them.

When government fiscal agencies propose and parliament thereafter approves a national budget, government agencies are then told how much money they have been allocated to spend (and on what exactly), and they begin to spend it. Such spending can occur via governments directly creating notional accounting entries that correspond to the budgetary amounts allocated. The question of whether this corresponds to the printing of money, the more general creation of money (for example the notional increase in commercial bank reserves held with the central bank that derive from direct government transfer/lending packages) or the issuance of new government bonds is secondary and largely immaterial to the spending process. Regardless, the public will still receive income as a result of this government spending (either via direct transfers or secondarily via the fiscal multiplier), on which they can then pay taxes, use to make miscellaneous purchases and even buy government bonds (thus increasing the national debt).

The concerns over deficit financing and government debt issuance have been addressed in section I previously by correctly re-framing debt sustainability instead as a question of debt affordability. As a reminder, by ensuring that nominal interest rate on the public debt is less than or equal to the growth rate of NGDP, debt sustainability is not a major cause for concern provided countries ensure that their debt portfolios have longer maturities and redemption dates are staggered to minimize rollover risks.

To take up the third point on printing money, the primary objection to this as a means to finance deficit spending stems from concerns that such an approach will stoke inflation and inflationary risks. Such concerns can be put to rest by recognizing that responsible governments are not typically confronted with situations akin to that of Weimar-era hyperinflation, indeed the circumstances of that episode are quite specific and extraordinary. Under more normal circumstances, printing money by itself will not necessarily result in hyperinflation (or even inflation especially in instances where aggregate demand is unusually weak like we see in the present pandemic precipitated economic downturn). In the Weimar hyperfinflation episode, the war had destroyed German productive capacity and the reparations owed were far in excess of the ability of the debilitated German economy to meet and so printing money was a last resort. When the severe lack of productive supply was met with demand from this excess cash, hyperinflation was invariably the result. The lesson here is clear, it is the lack of goods, labour, or productive capacity that acts as in inflation trigger and not just the printing of money per se.

“The lesson here is clear, it is the lack of goods, labour, or productive capacity that acts as in inflation trigger and not just the printing of money per se.”

Another contrasting example will illuminate this point further. In 2009, former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke was interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutes about the federal government’s US$1 trillion bailout of the banking system during the 2008 financial crisis. When asked if the US$1 trillion had come from taxpayers, he explained that no it was actually printed. His exact response was,

“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money than it is to borrowing.” – Ben Bernanke (2009)

Pelley (60 Minutes correspondent): “You’ve been printing money?”

Bernanke: “Well, effectively. And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low.”

As these examples illustrate, this isn’t to say that governments can throw caution to the wind with regards to printing money (and more generally in creating money), but rather the message here is that responsible sovereign governments that issue their own fiat currencies (and have low levels of short-term foreign currency denominated external debt) can print money without fears of inflation as long as they do not run up against the relevant supply-side constraints.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and unraveling the deficit myth

Following on from the contextual discussion above, let us briefly cover some key aspects of MMT (and the functional finance) position on the public budget spending debate. The MMT viewpoint is a major departure from the conventional economic position on the workings of public finance and monetary operations (See here and here for a good overview).

MMT argues that sovereign governments controlling their own currency can always create more money to pay off debts in their own currency and hence can spend freely.

A government can via fiscal spending grow its economy to full capacity while reducing unemployment, and also simultaneously funding major public spending initiatives in healthcare, education, and green energy programs without being constrained by fiscal budget sustainability even over longer horizons.

According to the mainstream economics perspective, governments levy taxes and then uses these taxes to pay for a portion of fiscal spending. To pay for the rest of its planned spending, governments then borrow by issuing bonds that investors can then buy. The standard view is that such borrowing has a major downside as government budget deficits increase the demand for borrowing (and hence loans) because the government needs loans over and above all the loans that private individuals and businesses are already demanding. This leads to what the conventional view terms as crowding out (of private sector investment borrowing) in the loanable funds market, as the increased demand for loans is expected to increase the cost of borrowing which must then be borne by everyone in the loan market.

In contrast, MMT adopts a significantly different perspective to this whole process. It’s worth noting that the MMT viewpoint has antecedents in an older view, endogenous money theory, that rejects the notion that there is a supply of loanable funds in the economy that private enterprises and governments must compete over.

According to endogenous money theory, loans by banks themselves create money in accordance with the market demand for money, which means that there will not be a firm trade-off between loaning to businesses and loaning to governments of the kind that necessarily drives interest rates to inexorably rise when governments borrow in large amounts.

The MMT viewpoint goes even further than endogenous money theory, and reasons that governments should never have to default as long as it is sovereign in its own currency (issues and controls the kind of money it taxes and spends). For example, sovereign governments like the US can’t go bankrupt from running out of dollars to pay its creditors since by definition it can’t possibly run out of dollars, since it also creates dollars. The consequence of this, and central to how MMT understands the workings of government taxation and spending [2], is that taxes and bonds do not necessarily directly pay for spending. Instead, governments create money whenever they fiscally spend!

So then, under the MMT view, why do governments tax? Governments tax for two big reasons. Firstly, taxation forces the populace to use government-issued currency. Since they have to pay income taxes in the currency, the populace then has a reason to earn, spend, and otherwise use the currency as opposed to, say, some foreign currency. Secondly, taxes are also a tool that governments can use to control inflation. Since taxes effectively take money out of the economy, this keeps prices from being bid up in the economy.

While government bond issuance isn’t absolutely necessary under MMT, bond issuance can be used to prevent interest rates in the economy from falling too low.

MMT argues that when the government spends, it adds more money to private bank accounts and therefore increases the reserve balances (cash which banks have set aside and not lent out) in the banking system. Since these reserves earn a very low interest rate, they push down overall interest rates. If the central bank wants higher interest rates, it will sell government bonds to banks. These government bonds earn higher interest rates than the reserves, thus raising overall interest rates.

As Abba Lerner (1951) [3] explained,

“spending of money … out of deficits keeps on increasing the stock of money (and bank reserves) and this keeps on pushing down the rate of interest. Somehow the government must prevent the rate of interest from being pushed down by the additions to the stock of money coming from its own expenditures … There is an obvious way of doing this. The government can borrow back the money it is spending“
– Abba Lerner (1951)

Such activities will require coordination with the treasury, and governments will usually issue new bonds approximately in step with deficit spending. Otherwise, central banks would run out of bonds to sell to soak up the excess reserves created by deficit public spending.

So bond issuance is a means to soak up excess reserves in order to prevent the rate of interest from being pushed down too much. In effect, government bond issuance is solely for the purpose of changing the distributional holdings between cash and bonds. To go even further, MMT explains that government-issued bonds aren’t even strictly necessary. A sovereign currency issuing government could, instead of issuing $1 in government bonds for every $1 in deficit spending, just create the money directly without issuing bonds.

What this all means is that, according to MMT, taxing less than the government spends, while issuing bonds in tandem will not prove to be a problem under most circumstances. The main constraint on government deficits under the MMT view is inflation. At times like now when inflation is low, this isn’t at all a major concern. From this discussion, we see how the MMT view handily disassembles the deficit myth, namely the idea that sustained national deficits and increasing pubic debt is unsustainable and must be reversed.

To close out this discussion, we should also mention that the MMT approach naturally incorporates Wynne Godley’s sectoral balances framework. Under this framework, it can be shown that when the government is in debt, that necessarily means that either the external economy must be in surplus (via a current account deficit) or the change in the net domestic private financial position is positive. That is, by virtue of accounting identities, the following must necessarily hold

Δ(Net Domestic Private Financial Position)
= Current Account Surplus + Consolidated Government Deficit (1)

This means that when a country imports more than it exports (and runs a current account deficit), and if the domestic economy is overwhelmed with debt that it’s trying to get rid of, the government necessarily has to run a deficit if it wants to help the private sector recover. On the other hand, if a country runs a (persistent) current account surplus, and the goal is to quickly improve the net domestic private financial position, the government should run a smaller surplus or even consider running a deficit.

A further accounting identity decomposition attributed to Rob Paranteau applied to (1) gives

Net Household Financial Income
= Current Account Surplus + Consolidated Government Deficit
+ Δ(Real Business Assets) (2)

From this it is clear that if the policy objective is to improve a country’s net household financial income, increasing the consolidated government deficit (or reducing the surplus) is the most direct policy tool to achieve this.

III. The implications for Singapore’s fiscal policy stance

Through the years, Singapore has consistently run budget surpluses with deficits the rare exception (deficits of 0.09% in 2009 and 3.48% in 2020, as a percentage of GDP). The policymaking narrative continually emphasizes the virtue and importance of fiscal prudence in ensuring fiscal budgets as far as possible are in surplus. The justification for this has primarily been on two fronts: 1) fiscal sustainability and 2) a need to “save” for “rainy days.” But there is another explicit reason compelling Singapore’s policymakers to eschew budget deficits that stem from the formal budgetary requirements of the Singapore Constitution.

According to the Singapore Constitution, the government is required to maintain a balanced budget over each elected term (typically 5 years), and any budget surplus or deficit cannot be carried over to the next term of government. Under each government term, any surplus at the end of a fiscal year is retained as current reserves which can thereafter be tapped in subsequent years of that same term. The Singapore Constitution prevents the government from borrowing to spend or spending surpluses accumulated from previous terms but it does allow the government to spend up to half of the expected long-term real returns from the net assets invested by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings. The Net Investment Returns Contribution (NIRC) is made up of up to 50% of the Net Investment Returns (NIR) on the net assets invested by GIC, MAS and Temasek Holdings alongside up to 50% of the Net Investment Income (NII) derived from past reserves from the remaining assets. The government may however draw on past reserves to supplement fiscal budgets during periods of unusual expenditure needs, but only with the approval of both Parliament and the President (this was done in 2009 during the global financial crisis).

As the constitution makes clear, the existence of the explicit requirement to maintain a balanced budget over each term of government weights each fiscal year’s budget towards a surplus, especially during the early portion of the government’s term when there are fewer prior years from which budget surpluses may provide a buffer to running a spending deficit (especially from a mental accounting standpoint). This feature will be especially significant now given that the coronavirus pandemic looks to be protracted and its economic fallout looks set to unleash Singapore’s worst recession in years. In such a difficult economic environment, it will be even more important to have ample fiscal headroom to enact large and extended countercyclical discretionary fiscal spending to help Singapore ride out the economic turbulence as well as set the economy up for a rapid recovery with minimal pain in the populace and destruction to our productive capacity.

As our more nuanced and evolved understanding of the mechanics of public finance and public debt and deficit sustainability has now taught us, we should not fear public deficits as we did before.

From our earlier discussion of debt sustainability (along more conventional lines), questions of debt sustainability even over longer horizons should be re-framed instead as questions of debt affordability. And to re-iterate, since public debt can be and is typically rolled over, debt burdens remain affordable as long as the interest rate on the debt remains less than or equal to the growth rate in nominal GDP. To minimize rollover risks, debt portfolios should also be constructed to have longer maturities as well as staggered maturity dates.

From the broader perspective of deficit sustainability informed by endogenous money theory and MMT, we see that taxing less than the government spends, while issuing government bonds in synchrony will not be a problem under most circumstances and the main constraint on government deficits is inflation. To accommodate any associated bond issuance in this regard, the government may wish to consider alternative ways of circumventing the constitutional restriction on borrowing to spend or explore putting in place special permissions to spend surpluses accumulated from previous terms of government. We note here that this is again being more cautious than necessary given our improved understanding of public finances and their management.

Outside of the stringent constitutional balanced-budget requirements, there’s an even simpler and operationally cleaner option. According to MMT, government-issued bonds aren’t even strictly necessary. A sovereign currency issuing government could, instead of issuing $1 in Treasury bonds for every $1 in deficit spending, just create the money directly. This offers the possibility of enacting larger spending programs in health, education, small and medium enterprise business support plus other broad areas of social spending that have thus far been limited by conventional budgetary rules of thumb which are holdovers from an earlier incomplete understanding of the mechanics of public finance. (A caveat here, since the Singapore dollar is managed within a band of a trade-weighted basket of its major trading partner currencies and thus not completely freely floating, there will likely be some limitation to money creation for this purpose.)

Lastly, giving consideration to Godley’s sectoral balances framework, if a key government policy objective is to improve the country’s net household financial income, increasing the consolidated government deficit (or reducing a surplus) is the most direct policy tool to achieve this especially during a major global economic downturn where we are not likely to see an increase in real business assets and the current account surplus is expected to weaken (and possibly even turn into deficit).

Thus, existing constitutional requirements aside, Singapore in principle does indeed have much more fiscal headroom than conventional public finance perspectives would suggest. So when confronted by allusions to the need to raise future taxes following increased fiscal spending today (and the implied fiscal inefficacy stemming from Barro-Ricardian equivalence when transfers are commuted to savings in anticipation of this) in dismissing alternative fiscal proposals with higher discretionary spending, let us remind ourselves that the responsibility of breaking free from this straitjacketed notion of policy inefficacy lies first with the policymakers who have accepted this public finance narrative unquestioningly. Its use here to argue against greater discretionary fiscal spending is, if anything, a failure of the policy imagination. Singapore has much more fiscal spending room than we realise and we should welcome more fiscally ambitious policy proposals. “Who will pay for it?” and “where will we find the money?” shouldn’t be the litmus test for policy consideration. All policies should be considered on their substantive content, objectives, feasibility of implementation and their impact in building a better Singapore for all rather than being subject to a first pass filter based on affordability before warranting evaluation.

References

1. Barrett, Philip, 2018. “Interest-Growth Differentials and Debt Limits in Advanced Economies.” IMF Working Paper No. 18/82
2. Stephanie Bell, 1998. “Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?” Economics Working Paper Archive working paper 244, Levy Economics Institute.
3. Lerner, Abba Ptachya, 1951. “Economics of Employment” McGraw-Hill