Often fiscal rules, designed to keep a lid on public deficits or debt, exclude borrowing for public investment from any deficit target. This is true of the UK government’s fiscal mandate, which seeks to achieve a cyclically-adjusted current budget balance within five years. The idea, in simple language, is to only borrow to invest. What could be wrong with that?
Most of the time public investment is not like private investment. A successful private investment will generate future income which can pay back any borrowing. A successful public investment project may raise future output, and this may increase future taxes, but there is no sense in which we would only undertake the project if we could be sure of paying off the borrowing with these extra taxes. A public investment project should be undertaken if discounted future social benefits exceed its costs. This cost has to be paid for by higher taxes at some point, so the question is simply when taxes will increase to do so.
In thinking about when to raise taxes, the obvious principle is tax smoothing. If taxes are distortionary, it is better to spread the pain. So if we need some additional public spending for just this year, one way to pay for it is to borrow, and use higher taxes just to pay the interest on that borrowing. That smooths the distortion over time. This is true whether the public spending involves consumption or investment. In contrast, if we are planning to raise public spending permanently, taxes should be raised by the amount of the increase in spending, and no borrowing should take place. Again this is true whatever the form of the additional expenditure. Now it is true that public investment projects tend to be temporary, while additional public consumption can be permanent, but the principle here is how taxes are distributed, rather than the nature of the spending.
This simple application of tax smoothing takes no account of distributional issues. If we believe that government consumption only benefits those paying taxes at that time, we might want taxes to rise with a temporary increase in government consumption rather than being smoothed. Why should future generations pay for the consumption enjoyed by the current generation? Here public investment would be different if it benefits both current and future generations. So from a distributional point of view, it might make sense to treat government consumption and investment separately. There are two problems here though. The first is that the distinction between public investment and consumption in the statistics does not necessarily follow this distributional logic. Education is classed as consumption. Second, how in practical terms do you allocate taxes paid to benefits received from public investment? (I touch on this here.)
One of the key points that Jonathan Portes and I stress in our discussion of fiscal rules is that rules have to balance optimality when governments are benevolent against effectiveness when they are not. One feature of periods of austerity is that public investment often gets hit hard. The reason this happens may also reflect intergenerational issues. To the extent that public investment benefits future generations, they are unable to complain when it is cut.
This can be one reason why rules sometimes use current balance targets rather than targets for the overall deficit. If public investment does not influence the target, it need not be cut. (This does not seem to have worked with George Osborne, as the victims of flooding found out!) However such rules are inevitably incomplete, because they say nothing about the overall level of public debt. In the case of the last Labour government, there were two rules: one involving the current balance over the cycle (only borrow to invest), and one specifying a total debt ceiling. There was an implicit target for public investment implied by the conjunction of the two rules, but it is unclear how sensible that implicit target was.
Jonathan and I suggest that the simpler and perhaps most effective way of preventing public investment being squeezed in times of austerity is to have a specific target for the share of public investment in GDP. Of course this target should also influence any overall deficit target, but if you want to protect public investment, it seems best to do so explicitly. If you do that, then it makes more sense to have just one target for the overall deficit (primary or total) that includes borrowing to invest, rather than a target for just the current balance.
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