Notwithstanding its widespread use as a measure of fiscal policy, the government deficit is not a well-defined concept from the perspective of neoclassical macro economics. From the neoclassical perspective the deficit is an arbitrary accounting construct whose value depends on how the...

Every country faces an intertemporal budget constraint, which requires that its government's future expenditures, including servicing its outstanding official debt, be covered by its government's future receipts when measured in present value. The present value difference between a country's...