Public expenditure

Definitions

Public expenditure may be understood as spending by central (federal), state and local governments and by the public corporations, or simply as spending by the public sector.

(For statistical purposes, however, those terms are open to differing interpretations, and to promote comparability, the has published the following definitions:

• The public sector comprises the general government sector plus all public corporations including the central bank.
• The government sector consists of the following resident institutional units: all units of central, state or local government; all social security funds at each level of government; all non-market non-profit institutions that are controlled and financed by government units.
• The general government sector consists of the totality of institutional units which, in addition to fulfilling their political responsibilities and their role of economic regulation, produce principally non-market services (possibly goods) for individual or collective consumption and redistribute income and wealth.)

The effects of public spending

Economic effects

Crowding-out and crowding-in

Under normal circumstances, private sector spending on government bonds is to some extent at the expense of spending on private sector bonds, with the consequence that some private-sector investment is "crowded out". To the extent that government bonds are used to finance consumption rather than investment, the total of the country's investment is diminished, leading in time to a loss of potential output. Crowding-out is seldom complete, however, but depends upon a range of factors including elasticities of demand for investment and for money . During a recession, crowding-out may to some extent be offset by "crowding-in" as government spending makes up for the deficiency in private sector spending, leading to a recovery of demand and an increase in private-sector investment. The balance between crowding out under particular circumstances is a matter of controversy .