Government spending

Government spending or expenditure includes all government consumption, investment, and transfer payments. In national income accounting, the acquisition by governments of goods and services for current use, to directly satisfy the individual or collective needs of the community, is classed as government final consumption expenditure. Government acquisition of goods and services intended to create future benefits, such as infrastructure investment or research spending, is classed as government investment (government gross capital formation). These two types of government spending, on final consumption and on gross capital formation, together constitute one of the major components of gross domestic product.

Spending by a government that issues its own currency is nominally self-financing. However, under a full employment assumption, to acquire resources produced by its population without potential inflationary pressures, removal of purchasing power must occur via government borrowing, taxes, custom duties, the sale or lease of natural resources, and various fees like national park entry fees or licensing fees. When these sovereign governments choose to temporarily remove spent money by issuing securities in its place, they pay interest on the money borrowed. Changes in government spending are a major component of fiscal policy used to stabilize the macroeconomic business cycle.

Public expenditure is spending made by the government of a country on collective or individual needs and wants of public goods and public services, such as pension, healthcare, security, education subsidies, emergency services, infrastructure, etc. Until the 19th century, public expenditure was limited due to laissez faire philosophies. In the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes argued that the role of public expenditure was pivotal in determining levels of income and distribution in the economy. Public expenditure plays an important role in the economy as it establishes fiscal policy and provides public goods and services for households and firms.

Several theories of taxation exist in public economics. Governments can be separated into two distinct types when it comes to their fiscal and monetary sovereignty: currency-issuers and currency-users. Currency-users at all levels (national, regional and local) need to raise revenue from a variety of sources to finance public-sector expenditures. They are not in control of the currency that their jurisdiction transacts in and so are restricted by what revenue they can raise prior to executing spending policies. Currency-issuing governments have no such nominal fiscal restriction. They have an infinite fiscal capacity in that, in principle, they can issue as much of their own currency as they like. However, real resources and productive capacity within an economy are finite. It is the acquisition of these real resources for the public purpose and a non-inflationary bias in government policy-making that places the constraint on currency-issuing government spending, rather than nominal financing from prior revenue collection.

The details of taxation are guided by two principles: who will benefit, and who can pay. Public expenditure means the expenditure on the developmental and non-developmental activity such as construction of roadways and dams, and other activity.

Rules or principles that govern the expenditure policy of the government are called "canons of public expenditure". Economist George Findlay Shirras laid down the following four canons of public expenditure, although some are understood not to be required:

Three other canons are:

The criteria and pre-conditions for arriving at this solution are collectively referred to as the principle of maximum social advantage. Taxation (government revenue) and government expenditure are the two tools. Neither of excess is good for the society, it has to be balanced to achieve maximum social benefit. Dalton called this principle as "Maximum Social Advantage" and Pigou termed it as "Maximum Aggregate Welfare".