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Population Ageing and the Efficiency of Fiscal Policy in New Zealand

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  • Nick Davis
  • Richard Fabling

    () (The Treasury)

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.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by New Zealand Treasury in its series Treasury Working Paper Series with number 02/11.

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Length: 23 pages
Date of creation: Jun 2002
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:nzt:nztwps:02/11

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Related research

Keywords: Public Finance; Tax Smoothing; Balanced Budget; Demographics; and Deadweight Loss;

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References

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Cited by:
  1. Lassila , Jukka & Valkonen, Tarmo, 2008. "Population ageing and fiscal sustainability in Finland: a stochastic analysis," Research Discussion Papers 28/2008, Bank of Finland.
  2. John Creedy & Grant M Scobie, 2002. "Population Ageing and Social Expenditure in New Zealand: Stochastic Projections," Treasury Working Paper Series 02/28, New Zealand Treasury.

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