he governments of many countries have structural budget deficits, so even as their economies recover from the COVID-recession they are still running deficits. In many countries, the fundamental structure of the budget is bad. There is too much spending relative to revenue, even in normal or good times, not just in recession. In this episode we explore how economists can calculate structural budget balances. We look specifically at what the Australian Treasury does, given that a new Australian Budget came out last week.
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored.
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Links relevant to the conversation
Australian structural budget balance indicators available here:
https://budget.gov.au/2022-23-october/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-3.pdf
Australian Treasury methodology for estimating structural budget balances:
IMF Fiscal Monitor which contains cyclically-adjusted budget balances (Tables A3 and A4):
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/FM
Media coverage of Australian budget:
IFS analysis of UK mini budget:
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/mini-budget-response
Transcript: Structural budget deficits – EP164
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Gene Tunny 00:00
Coming up on Economics Explored.
So I think this is a really neat methodology that the treasurer is trying to break down the different influences on the budget to see what’s really going on. And what it reveals is that there’s this structural problem with the budget.
Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny broadcasting from Brisbane, Australia. This is episode 164 on structural budget balances, government budgets around the world was smashed by COVID-19. With countries recording huge deficits and big increases in debt. The governments of many countries have structural budget deficits. So even as their economies recover, they are still running deficits. In many countries, the fundamental structure of the budget is bad. There is too much spending relative to revenue, even in normal times, not just in recession. For example, the IMF estimates the United States will have a structural or cyclically adjusted government budget deficit of five to 7% of GDP over 2023 to 2027. In this episode, we explore how economists can calculate structural budget balances, we consider the different components of budgets, the structural, cyclical and temporary. We look specifically at what the Australian Treasury does, given that a new Australian budget came out last week. Joining me for the conversation is my Adept Economics colleague, Arturo Espinoza. Please check out the show notes relevant links and clarifications and for details where he can get in touch with any questions or comments. I’d love to hear from you. Righto, now for my conversation with Arturo on structural budget balances, thanks for my audio engineer Josh Crotts assistance in producing this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Arturo, good to be with you again.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 01:49
Hi Gene. My pleasure to be here.
Gene Tunny 01:51
Excellent. Arturo, so I thought today we could have a good chat about this concept of a structural budget balance. So we had our federal budget, the Australian government budget was released last week. So for 2023, the financial year. And this was because we have a new government. So there was an election in May. And there was a change of government, we now have a Labour government. So a more left wing government than the previous government, which was the Liberal National Government, the coalition government, and in Australia, a Liberal government is actually a conservative government. It’s all very confusing. Right, so we had a change of government and there was some improvement in the current year budget balance because of higher commodity prices, which flow through to, to earnings to and to tax revenue, that the federal government pulls in, particularly from the big mining companies. So there was an improvement in that underlying what they call the underlying cash balance. But this federal government is still running quite significant deficits. So it’s still running a deficit of some $37 billion, this financial year, the previous government did its budget back in May, I think they were projecting that up around must have been nearly 80 billion, I can’t remember exactly. But it was an improvement on that. But it’s still one and a half percent of GDP at $37 billion. And then over what they call the forward estimates, which is out to 25-26. We’ve still got deficits in the range of 40 to $50 billion, approximately, and, you know, up to 2% of GDP is in 24-25. So we’ve still got significant deficits. And the problem that we’re seeing in Australia, and this is similar to in other countries, too, is that governments are just spending much more than they’re bringing in in revenue. I mean, I guess that’s what a deficit is, right? I mean, that’s, but but there’s a problem that, that because of politics, because no one wants to pay taxes, politicians don’t want to put up taxes, and they want to deliver the goodies, they want to fund a high level of services for the population, and that helps them get elected. And so we’ve got this, this problem, this imbalance between what they’re spending and what they’re bringing in in taxes. And this is where I think this structural budget balance concept is of great use. And I just want to talk about that. So does that make sense Arturo, what we’re going to cover today?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 04:45
Yeah, that makes sense. It also is a very interesting topic related to government debts and this structural budget.
Gene Tunny 04:58
Yeah, yeah. So It’s always a concept that’s fascinated me. So I used to work in the Treasury in the budget policy area. And when I was there, we didn’t produce this structural budget balance estimate, and there was a big debate about whether Australia should have one and whether it’s feasible to develop one because as we’ll discover, you have to make all sorts of assumptions to generate it. It’s it, there’s a there’s a bit of, you know, there’s there, there’s a bit of number crunching that goes into it. And you have to make all sorts of assumptions regarding, well, what’s the normal state of affairs, because one way of thinking about this structural budget balance is that it’s what the budget would be if you took away the cyclical or cyclical factors. So if you if you’re able to abstract or control for the business cycle, so whether the economy is booming, or whether it’s slumping, then it gives you the budget balance that you would get in that situation, because one of the problems with the standard budget balance as a, as a measure of how the gut of the government is performing in a fiscal sense is that it is what economists call endogenous, it’s determined, partly, it’s determined or largely as determined by the state of the economy is determined within the system, it’s endogenous. It’s not something that the government can, can totally set, exogenously or it doesn’t have full control over it. Because your level of taxes depend on the state of the economy and commodity prices in Australia, if the iron ore prices is really high, or the coal price is high, then BHP, Rio Tinto, et cetera, the big mining companies, they’re only more profits and the federal government, it gets a share that it gets about 30% of their profits. So yeah, that can have a, you know, that can mean billions of dollars to the budget bottom line. And so that’s why we see the budget balance, it’s, it moves with the economic cycle, and so your government could be running a deficit. But that could be understandable, given the state of the economy. And so the underlying budget is okay, the structural part of the budget is okay, that’s not the case with Australia, but I’m just using that as an illustration. So it may be useful. Well, I think it is very useful to adjust for those cyclical factors. And that’s what the Australian Treasury has done in what I think is one of the most useful charts in the budget, which is in their statement on the fiscal outlook chart 320, the structural budget balance. And that really tells a story, it tells a story about how within the federal budget, because of this, this gap between what the government is spending money on and what we’re paying in taxes. So if government spending is at a level of around 26% of GDP. And revenue is under 24% of GDP. Or maybe it’s 25. And 23. It’s sort of that sort of order of magnitude, or it’s those are approximate figures, I’ll put the right figures in the show notes, we’ve got this gap. And this is a permanent gap. It’s a structural gap. And this is what this chart shows of two percentage points of, or 2% of GDP. And this is baked into the budget. And this is what this structural budget balance chart shows. So what they’ve, what they’ve done is the they’ve worked out that structural factors, leading to a deficit of about 2% of GDP, cyclical factors, so the state of the economy, the state of commodity prices, the fact that the iron ore price is super high, the fact that the economy has been booming. What that’s doing is pushing up, or that’s improving the budget balance by looks like 1.8 or 1.9%. If you look at the chart, and what that is telling me and what that is, this is for the current financial year 22-23. What it’s telling me is that, well, if we didn’t have that, that structural problem in the budget where we’re just spending more than we’re, we’re bringing in, and that’s the case and that would be the case in a normal year, in an average year. If we just control the economic cycle. If we didn’t have that structural problem. And if we looked at what the strength of the economy is commodity prices, and the government should be running a budget surplus of nearly 2% of GDP, and in actual fact, it’s running a budget, a budget deficit of what is it, one and a half percent of GDP. So there’s this big, there’s this big gap, which, in a way, represents the additional demand that the government is generating in the economy that isn’t warranted, given the economic circumstances. So the government budget is highly stimulatory to the economy and that is arguably a problem for Well, I think it is a problem, it’s contributing to the inflationary situation that we have in the Australian economy at the moment. And likewise, governments around the world that are running large budget deficits, such as the US government, such as the UK Government are contributing to the inflationary situations in in those countries, because if you looked at what the budget should be, given the state of the economy, it should be in a lot better state than than it is now than then those budgets are now and that’s what this cyclically adjusted budget balance or structural budget balances is approximating. Okay, one of the other fascinating things in that chart, I should note, the Treasurer is prepared on the structural budget balance for Australia, is that in 22-23, there’s still a sizable impact over 1% of GDP coming from temporary fiscal measures. So these are things that are related to COVID 19, to the pandemic response. So even though, I mean, look, I know that COVID COVID is still around, and apparently we’ve got another wave coming. I mean, the worst part of the pandemic is over, but still there is a, we do have these temporary fiscal measures occurring. And so what that means is, yeah, so that’s, that’s something that’s contributing to the, the deficit here in Australia. So what that chart is telling us is that, look, the structural budget, the structural problem in the budget is around two percentage points, or 2% of GDP. The cyclical, the benefit to the budget from the improvement in the economic cycle and higher commodity prices is, is just under 2% of GDP. So what that would suggest is that, that would mean we’d have a budget deficit of just a fraction of GDP, like maybe point one or point 2% of GDP. But then we’ve got these. Actually, it might be point three or point four, I’ll have to check the numbers that don’t put the exact numbers in the charts. I’m just trying to eyeball and I’m not wearing my glasses. But then we’ve got this temporary fiscal measures, which is, which is worsening the budget by over 1% of GDP. And how these all sort of add up is that we end up with a budget deficit in 22-23. Of what was it, one and a half percent. So I think this is a really neat methodology that the treasurer is trying to break down the different influences on the budget to see what’s really going on. And what it reveals is that there’s this structural problem with the budget. And, you know, this is something that all treasuries and finance ministers should do, in my opinion. There are some IMF estimates for other countries we’ll talk about later, the Australian Treasury seems to be doing a really good job at its estimates, and it’s discovered this structural problem, this big hole in the budget. Okay, so does that all make sense Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 14:01
Yeah, that makes sense. That was very clear. This is incredible how Australia is spending around this, because you, you mentioned around two or 3% is spending more than what they receive in terms of revenue. But let’s explore what are the main components of that structure, structural deficit?
Gene Tunny 14:33
Yes, well, a big component, or one of the major contributors to it in recent years, has been the National Disability Insurance Scheme. So it’s this expansion of the welfare state. Now I’m not making any judgement about whether that’s a good idea or not, because it’s very popular, and it’s well intentioned and there are clearly a lot of people out there in need. One of the challenges with it, though, is that it is growing at a very high rate. So it’s not the total structural deficit, because it’s at the moment, I think it’s around $30 billion. So it’s not just the NDIS. It’s other things. And then we have, we’ve had various tax cuts in the past, there’s a stage three tax cut that’s programmed in. So there’s going to be a tax cut in 2024-25, which aims to get rid of one of the tax brackets and to flatten the progressivity of the tax system. And that’s going to cost the budget revenue. So it’s a combination of spending new spending programmes and spending programmes that are costing more money than were expected. Also, we’ve got rising interest, a rising interest bill at the moment because of higher interest rates. And then people on the left of politics would argue, Well, look, the the problem is, we’re just not raising enough in taxation, if you’re going to spend this and that, look, that’s one legitimate perspective. If the government is going to spend this much on a permanent basis, if we are committed to an NDIS, National Disability Insurance Scheme, then we will have to have higher taxes to make the budget sustainable in the long term. I mean, personally, I’d prefer that we’d have lower taxes, we would, we would, we would get spending under control. But look, if we can’t get spending under control, then we may have to, we may have to put up with that. So because ultimately, we do need a sustainable budget, we’ve got to keep that debt to GDP ratio under control. At the moment, the projections are that for Australia, it’s not looking catastrophic yet, luckily, I mean, it’s on the current budget projections, it’s going to get up to around 48% of GDP. So it’s going to plateau around that, by the What is it 2030 to 2033. There’s another chart where they’re projecting that in how that’s going to perform. So this is the debt to GDP, which is one of the critical ratios that commentators, economists, ratings agencies, like S&P and Fitch and Moody’s, what they look at. And I mean, Australia’s lucky we started off with so what we started off with no debt to begin with, in 2008, we had, we had negative net debt, and we only had $50 billion of bonds on issue. So we’re in a good position to start with, so we’re at, we’re only gonna get up to about 50% of GDP at the moment compared with you look at the states, which is the US it’s over. We had a look the other day, didn’t we? I mean, it’s up 120 to 130% of GDP or something. Yeah. Okay. It’s very high if you look at projections for actual data and projections for the US. So we’re, we’re nowhere near that what’s happening is that the outlook is worsening. So if you look at that Treasury chart and the budget, compared with where we were back in May, or back in April, when the government released its last budget, that’s right before the election, and then the Treasury put out the pre election, fiscal, economic and fiscal outlook, the instead of the gross debt to GDP ratio, peaking around 24-25 and then falling as the economy grows, and the debt doesn’t, doesn’t grow as fast, which was what they were previously forecasting back in April. And they had the gross debt to GDP ratio going to 40%. Instead, it’s going to continue to grow over this decade, and then start to flatten out around 2032 to 33 at around 48%. And I mean, who knows that could get worse. I mean, this out. So much depends on what happens with interest rates and a big part of this change, why things are worse now than they were back in April is one, it’s because this NDIS is growing, the cost of that is growing faster than expected. And also because of the higher interest burden. I think that’s really shocked people and this is something I’ve been calling out for a while I’ve been identifying for a while that this as interest rates rise, that’s going to have a big impact on the budget, because we’ve got so much debt already not as much as other countries but still more than we’ve had in the past. So well in the last few decades, okay, so does that answer your question Arturo? You’re asking about where’s it come from? And yeah, where’s that structural deficit come from? And look, it’s a, it’s a variety of things. It’s just our willingness to bear the taxes. It’s either you can either look at it as our unwillingness to pay the taxes that we need to to fund the level of services. That’s one perspective. That’s the perspective of people like The Australia Institute, they would argue that all these things we’re spending money on. So from a left wing perspective, I’m not making any judgments at the moment about, I mean, I’ve got my own personal judgement, but I’ll just present both sides of the story, they would argue we’re not, we’re not raising revenue. And then the people on the other side, they would like the IPA or whoever the right, they would argue, well, we’re actually spending too much relative to what we’re paying in taxes, the level of taxation is fine or should be cut even further, let’s cut expenditure. And the government itself is very conscious it, it doesn’t want to raise taxes, right, because raising taxes is politically unpopular. No one wants to buy any more tax. So it looks like the government itself recognises that it will have to cut spending. I mean, maybe it’ll try and tweaks and tax policy settings or, or cuts in tax concessions. Jim Chalmers, the Treasurer here who he’s talking about taking a forensic approach to tax concessions. There was a story in the Australian today, so it looks like they’re gonna have a look at some of those tax concessions, so who knows they could look at tax concessions for superannuation, and they could look at our concessional taxation of capital gains, things like that. So we’ll have to wait and see what happens there. But look in the IRS is the one that they really need to look at because it’s just growing at a very high rate. So let me try to illustrate that with some figures. So last week’s federal budget so I’m quoting from a report in the Australian day today revealed the NDIS which will cost the federal and state governments $35.5 billion this financial year is on track to hit 52 billion by 2025 26, dwarfing the costs of both Medicare and aged care. So long term Treasury forecasts suggests the federal government’s contribution to the scheme will grow by almost 14% a year for the next decade, with total scheme costs approaching 100 billion by 2030 to 33. It became operational in 2013. It currently has 555,000 participants. Its annual financial sustainability reports suggest numbers will reach almost 860,000 by 2030. More young people with diagnoses of autism and psychosocial disorders are entering the scheme. Almost a third of current participants have an autism diagnosis. And four and 10 are age 14 and under. So this is an illustration of one of the challenges of public services. I think because there is a lot of need out there are a lot of people who are doing it tough or there’s a lot of need in the community. And as soon as the government gets involved, there are a lot of pressures on the government to expand the level of service to increase the level of service. This is a great challenge for the government. I remember when I was in workplace health and safety here in Queensland, it’s nearly 20 years ago now. I remember the policy discussions around the need to look after people who are catastrophically injured. This NDIS has come out of a need to at least look after people who fell through the cracks of the previous system. What happened years ago was if you were catastrophically injured say you had a diving accident. And it was recreational diving. You weren’t covered by any insurance. Okay, there’s, it’s it wasn’t a motor vehicle accident. It wasn’t a workplace accident. And there would be very high costs of care if you were made quadriplegic, for example, but there’s no insurance to cover you. And so there was this concern that there are these people who are missing out. And so there’s clearly some sort of there was a need definitely to do something to help those people out. And this whole NDIS from what I can tell grew out of that conversation that was occurring around the early 2000s because I remember being part of the conversation at the Queensland Government level and some of the policy development there and then it came out of this 2008, the 2020 summit that Kevin Rudd organised his ideas fest that they had in the talk fest that they had at Parliament House and, and they invited 1000 of the best and brightest from around Australia. And this was one of the ideas that was advanced at the summit. And, this was one of the ones that progressed and then the Gilad government introduced that I think in 2013. And look, it’s a really valid thing. There is certainly cases, people that needed assistance. The problem is where do you draw the line, and this is a problem that governments often have. And here, the line has become, the circle has expanded even more. And I mean, people or families with autism, and with developmental delay, certainly need assistance. And I’m on the board of a non-for-profit that advocates for families where a child has a developmental delay, so I fully understand the concerns. And the need. The issue is that there’s a big cost to the budget from having this expansive definition. And the government is currently I mean, we’ll have to wait and see what it what it does about it all. Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
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Gene Tunny 26:52
Now back to the show. So any questions or any thoughts on that Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 27:01
No, at the moment..
Gene Tunny 27:02
Good. So yeah, that’s essentially where we’ve got this structural budget balance problem coming from Australia. And I thought it might be good just to go over quickly, what the different sources or the different ways that they adjust for the state of the economy. And what it comes down to is coming up with estimates of how the economy would have performed, what it would do in the absence of a business cycle. So you have to work out what a trend level of GDP is. So the if you think about macro economics, one way of thinking about how the economy evolves over time is a cycle and trend. There’s the economy. Over time, we know that the economy expands. So the economy today is much larger than it was 10 years ago, it’s much larger than it was 20 years ago, 30 years ago. So over time it grows, there’s trend growth, it’s on an upward trajectory. But it will cycle around that trend. So you can have periods where you’re well above that trend when the economy’s booming. And then you can have periods when you’re, you’re well below you’re in a recession, for example. And so what these structural budget balance estimates, what they do, is they will they based on an estimate of what that trend level of GDP would be. And so what they will do, what the Treasury will do, if they will look at, well, what’s the underlying population growing at? What’s productivity, on average growing at? And are there any trends in labour force participation that we need to take into account? And this is this supply side model, underpinning these trend GDP estimates? So these are what you would expect in the absence of a business cycle. And so that’s one of the core parts of it, they’re trying to control the business cycle. And then they also have to control commodity prices. So they’ll look at well, how much higher than we normally are commodity prices, the iron ore price or coal price, how much higher are they than we normally expect them to be? And let’s discount that, let’s, let’s, let’s assume that they’re not so high. And so the Treasury will have these parameters. They’ll have these sensitivities of different types of these revenue, items of income tax and company income tax, two different commodity prices they’ll have, and they’ll have an estimate of how sensitive the unemployment benefits that are paid are to the state of the economy to where GDP is relative to its trend. And I think that’s the one item that the Treasury adjusts. So it tweaks it adjust revenue on the revenue side and adjusts income tax and company tax. And I think capital gains tax, if I remember correctly on the expenditure side, it just adjusts unemployment benefits. We know that unemployment benefit payments are going to be higher if the economy’s in recession, lower if it’s, if it’s booming. And so there’s an adjustment that’s made there. And there’s a whole bunch of assumptions that go into these estimates. Does that all make sense Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 30:39
Yes, it’s all clear.
Gene Tunny 30:42
Okay, so what I’ll do is I’ll put a link in the show notes to a paper estimating the structural budget balance of the Australian government that was by three of my old colleagues. So Tony McDonald, Yong Hong Yan, who I don’t know, Blake Ford and David Stephan, I worked with Tony, Blake and David. So all good people. So that’s a great paper. I’ll link to that in the show notes. And I’ve noticed that the IMF also produces some estimates of these structural budget balances, although they call them, they use the other, the other name for them cyclically adjusted balance, and you can find these at the back of what’s called the IMF fiscal monitor. And I’m looking at the one from October 2022. So check that out. There’s a whole range of interesting estimates there. So if for example, you look at table A3 for advanced economies, general governments cyclically adjusted balance 2013, to 27. So it’s got historical data, it’s got forecasts in it. For Australia, they’ve got their own estimates of what the structural budget deficit is, they’ve got estimates that go from around, or three and a half percent in 2022. So that’s a calendar year 3.1%, deficit and 2324 to 2.6%. And it gets down to about .7%, deficit in 2027. So not as bad as the Australian Treasury’s estimates, which are, which have the structural deficit maintaining around 2%. There are reasons why the IMF figures are different from the Australian Government’s because the IMF, the IMF doesn’t take into account as many factors. It’s on a calendar year basis, the Treasury and I think in one of its papers, it goes through why it’s estimates are different from say, the IMF or the OECD, I think for Australia, the Treasury are probably doing a better job at it just because the IMF and and the other agency, international agencies, they have to do it for all the countries and they’re not experts in any particular country. I think the Australian Treasury’s estimates are probably better for getting a sense of the structural problem in the budget, the Treasury has got access to, to much better info, much better data on Australia, then the IMF, it’s got much better insights, I should say, into what’s going on. And its model for the structural budget balance for Australia is much more precise. It goes into more detail than the IMF. So all I’m saying is I think the, I think the Australian Treasury numbers are better than what the IMF is, is estimating there. And I tend to agree that there is that structural budget balance of, of 2% of GDP, which is a challenge for this current government, and will probably be a challenge for future governments. And it’s going to require either large cuts in spending. So getting the NDIS under control, which is going to be hugely unpopular, because it’s a very popular programme and well intentioned. And I know people are benefiting from it. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s giving people a sense of dignity and improving people’s quality of life. So look, who knows, I mean, this government, because it’s a government from the sort of left wing I mean, it’s not as left wing as some other governments you’d see around the world. It’s not left if you think about what left, left wing governments are in South America, for example. But it’s not. It’s going to find it difficult because it is more left wing than right wing. So the Liberal National Government is going to find it difficult to cut something like NDIS or cut welfare benefits, and hence maybe it does have to look at some tax measures. Maybe it does have to cut it tax concessions heavily. Maybe it does have to adjust that stage three tax cut that’s programmed in, maybe not give us much of much, maybe not have such a big tax cut. We’ll have to wait and see. Okay. Anything else Arturo, that we should cover before we wrap up?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 35:21
Yes, I think I wanted to highlight that it should be a good discussion was a good topic to see which of those programmes social programmes are working? Good in terms of indicators. So in terms of the results on population, you’re in to see if there is any problem there. But because we know that not all the things are all the social programmes are working well. Perhaps that will be a good topic to discuss, to discuss in other episodes.
Gene Tunny 36:04
Yeah, look, I think you’re right there. And what this is highlighting I think, Arturo is yes, the need to, to really delve into whether these programmes are working or not, because we’ve got these programmes that are well intentioned, that governments they hope to do some good to achieve outcomes, but how do we know that they are actually achieving outcomes? Are they doing it in the most cost effective way? And that’s why something like this evaluate a general concept could be so valuable. This is an idea that the first person I remember proposing it was Nicolas Gruen. And so Nick’s been on the show before, well known Australian economist, CEO of lateral economics, I do some work with Nick from time to time. And, you know, he’s been involved in public policy for decades, he was involved with the button car plan back in the 80s. He was involved with your work for the treasurer in the 90s, very lateral thinker, and he came up with this idea of the evaluator general, which would have a, it would have a brief of going across the Australian Government and figuring out which programmes work, which don’t, are there other ways we do things, other innovative ways we can do things to, to solve problems. And it looks like this government is going to go ahead with some sort of evaluator general. So Jim Chalmers has pledged to put in place an effective and rigorous evaluator general and new offers based within treasury and flagged by Labour before the 2019 election, which could work with other departments to access to assess the effectiveness of government programmes. Okay, great stuff. So this is in an article by Joe Kelly in the Australian, I’ll put a link in the show notes that I was quoting from there. I think one of the issues Nick has with that proposal, though, is that it’s located within the Treasury, I think he would prefer that it has its own life, it’s outside of the Treasury. It’s a statutory authority, it has some degree of independence granted by the parliament. So yeah, I don’t think Nick’s actually I can’t speak for him. I should have him on the show to talk about that. But I’m guessing he’s probably thinks that that’s not exactly what we need. But look, I should let him. Let him speak about that in the future. So that’s the evaluator general. So I think that’s the sort of thing you’re driving at is it Arturo? That we, because we need to evaluate these programmes. The evaluator General’s one way of doing that. Exactly. So one thing I thought I should cover before we wrap up, is just what happened with the UK earlier. When was it last month? Or remember, they had their mini budget, maybe it was in September now? They had the mini budget, Liz Truss the new PM, no longer PM, shortest reigning PM in British history. And the chancellor Kwasi kwarteng, I think it was, and they released that mini budget with a big tax cut, and the markets just absolutely went nuts. The pound crashed. We had yields on UK bonds spike, because everyone there and this is the recognition that there was a structural problem already with the UK budget, the UK couldn’t afford to have a tax cut, who was going to spend, go on spending what it was spending, and it’s just quite extraordinary the way that the Institute of Fiscal Studies describe that and I’ll put a link to this in the show notes, I think it’s a great note and some really good take on it. The way they describe that mini budget, which has been reversed because the current, there’s a recognition that it was unsustainable, so we’ve got a new PM now and a new chancellor, and they’re, and they’re, they’ve reversed that. I think Liz truss, had even reversed it. And she had sacked her Chancellor, but okay, so it’s gone. But for a short time it was in place and the markets absolutely freaked out. And yeah, this is the IFS take, which I think is great, which was made at the time the chancellor announced the biggest package of tax cuts in 50 years without even a semblance of an effort to make the public finance numbers add up. That is just brutal. Goes to show just how important it is to actually care about this stuff. And I mean, I’ve been saying this for years, I used to work in the Treasury in the budget area, and I know how important it is to get this stuff right and not to go and do silly things. And so I understand where IFS is coming from and understand why the markets really just hated that mini budget. And there’s a great, there’s a great chart and that IFS analysis, which showed that if you look at what was happening to the, to the national debt or the the UK public debt, if you compare that mini budget, what would have happened with the mini budget was what was expected before so instead of the debt as a percent of national income, staying in the range from 80 to 85%, of GDP going down gradually, over the next five years, from around 85 to 80. Instead, it was going to end up going from a bit under 85% to nearly 95%. So it’s just a really bad policy. So understandably, that mini budget was absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the markets just reacted very badly and essentially brought down the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, just because, yeah, it was just very irresponsible fiscal policy. And that’s what we’ve always got to guard against now. We’re not there yet in Australia because we started off in such a good position, debt to GDP is still relatively low compared with other countries. We’ve got a bit of room, still we’ve got time, we’ve got time to turn it around. But we’ve got to start doing something because we just can’t be in a situation where we keep accumulating debt. And we know, we know there’ll be another crisis of some kind, there’ll be a downturn, hopefully, we don’t have another pandemic, but there’s going to be another crisis, there’ll be a period when we end up adding lots of debt in a short period of time or a few years. And that will mean a higher interest burden, these projections of our debt to GDP, starting to flatten out around 2032 to 33 at 48% of GDP. Okay, that could give us some comfort, but we just don’t know what’s coming down the track. My worry is that interest rates could go higher. There could be another downturn or a crisis and then we add more debt on and then that gross debt to GDP, instead of flattening out it goes on an upward trajectory. That’s a risk I worry about and why it’s so important to get the budget under control. Okay. Final thoughts, Arturo?
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 43:39
No, thank you for all your explanation Gene.
Gene Tunny 43:43
Very good. Well, it’s been great chatting with you, Arturo. And I’ll look forward to chatting again. And if you’re listening in the audience, if you want to look at any of these, these articles I’ve mentioned, I’ll put links in the show notes. Please get in touch with any questions or comments. Let me know whether you agree or disagree. Let me know if they’re things you want to know more about, and I’ll do my best to cover them in a future episode. So thanks for listening. And Arturo, thanks for joining me.
Arturo Espinoza Bocangel 44:14
Thank you for having me, Gene. Bye.
Gene Tunny 44:17
Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com And we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye
Thanks to Josh Crotts for mixing the episode and to the show’s sponsor, Gene’s consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au.
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