IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecanpo/v44y2014i4p364-375.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How sustainable is sub-national public debt in Australia??

Author

Listed:
  • Anthomy J. Malkin
  • Julian Pearce

Abstract

Since the Global Financial Crisis the public indebtedness of Australiaùs States and Territories has risen significantly due to sizeable fiscal deficits. This paper examines the stability of sub-national governmentsù indebtedness before gauging the fiscal effort needed to scale back public debt to GSP ratios to ten-year average levels. To do this, we first derive key debt sustainability formulae which are then applied to relevant sub-national data. The analysis reveals that under macroeconomic conditions and fiscal settings in 2012ó13, debt levels were unstable for all State and Territory general governments. Moreover, virtually all sub-national governments in Australia need to turn existing primary budget deficits into substantial surpluses to restore public debt to levels experienced on average over the previous decade. This is not in prospect without even more substantial fiscal consolidation than currently envisaged in State and Territory budgets.

Suggested Citation

  • Anthomy J. Malkin & Julian Pearce, 2014. "How sustainable is sub-national public debt in Australia??," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 44(4), pages 364-375.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecanpo:v:44:y:2014:i:4:p:364-375
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592614000587
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Carmignani, Fabrizio, 2015. "Can public expenditure stabilize output? Multipliers and policy interdependence in Queensland and Australia," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 69-81.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecanpo:v:44:y:2014:i:4:p:364-375. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/economic-analysis-and-policy .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.