Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/205486 
Year of Publication: 
2002
Series/Report no.: 
New Zealand Treasury Working Paper No. 02/11
Publisher: 
New Zealand Government, The Treasury, Wellington
Abstract: 
New Zealand's ageing population is expected to have a significant impact on long-term government expenditure, particularly in the areas of health and superannuation. Recent projections from Treasury's Long-Term Fiscal Model suggest that, under current policy settings, government expenditure (excluding financing costs) will increase by approximately seven percentage points of GDP by 2050. From the perspective of economic efficiency, we consider several methods for financing that expenditure. We find that tax smoothing is significantly more efficient, from a welfare perspective, than balancing the budget. This result is primarily due to our assumption that the assets accumulated under tax smoothing earn an average return over the government's cost of borrowing. This excess return is not without risk. By modelling asset returns and economic growth in a stochastic manner we find that tax smoothing with a diversified portfolio of financial instruments may also reduce year-on-year tax rate volatility. Introducing practical considerations, in particular expenditure creep (where additional government spending is triggered by an improving balance sheet position), tips the scales in favour of a balanced budget approach. Hence, strong fiscal institutions are a prerequisite for achieving the welfare gains from tax smoothing.
Subjects: 
Public Finance
Tax Smoothing
Balanced Budget
Demographics
and Deadweight Loss
JEL: 
H30
H60
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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