Public Pension Economics (1993) (Journal of Economics Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie Supplementum #7)
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into UK education collection to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- Recent years have witnessed a growing unease about using government deficits to measure fiscal policy. Martin Feldstein (1974) pointed out that vast amounts of unfunded Social Security retirement liabilities are not picked up in official debt figures. The 1982 Economic Report of the President and Leonard (1987) stressed the same is true of unfunded civil service and military pensions and a range of other programs such as FSLIC commitments, etc. Eisner and Pieper (1984, 1985), Boskin (1987), and Boskin, Robinson, and Huber (1987) fault the official U. S. deficit for ignoring government assets. These and a host of related complaints about conventional deficit accounting coincided with demonstrations by Kotlikoff (1979), Summers (1981), Charnley (1981), Auerbach and Ko tlikoff (1983) and others that 1) major intergenerationally-redistributive fiscal policies can be conducted under the guise of a "balanced budget" and 2) identical fiscal policies can be conducted concomitant with dra matically different time paths of reported deficits. While some economists, including Eisner and Pieper (1983, 1985) and Leonard (1987) suggest that the deficit can be fixed, the arbitrary nature of such corrections raises the question of whether the deficit is a well-defined economic concept. Unfortunately, it is not. In a series of articles (Kotlikoff 1984, 1986, 1988) I have pointed out that from a neoclassical perspective the deficit is an arbitrary accounting construct with no necessary relation ship to the fundamental stance of fiscal policy.
- Copyright:
- 1993
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9783709166659
- Related ISBNs:
- 9783211824320
- Publisher:
- Springer Vienna
- Date of Addition:
- 03/23/24
- Copyrighted By:
- N/A
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Business and Finance, Mathematics and Statistics
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
- Edited by:
- Bernhard Felderer