Die Durchsetzung der Haushaltspolitik und der Haushaltsführung

Adopting the debt break as the highest fiscal rule for the Swiss federal budget has ended the long legalization process surrounding the federal budget management. The debt break guarantees a passive-anticyclic budget policy by allowing discretionary measures during extraordinary circumstances. Through its standards in law and regulation, it binds the financial management to a supervisory fiscal rule. Furthermore, the Swiss federal debt break served as a model for the German federal debt break. It also functions as an addition to the various cantonal fiscal rules. While the German Federal Constitutional Court is able or even obliged to check whether each and every proposal is compliant with the debt break, the Swiss equivalent lacks any possibility for legal review. The cantonal budget laws, too, lack any judicial protection. To ensure that supervisory fiscal rules are enforced, financial policy actors can choose to follow the implementation laws. Also, the implementation of such is supervised by financial control authorities and independent control mechanisms within the budget laws. These enforcement mechanisms are supported by the principles of budget management that are valid throughout the entire budget and accounting process. Comparing the enforceability of the Swiss federal budget with its cantonal equivalents as well as the German federal debt break leads to the question whether the Swiss rules are sufficiently actionable. For the Swiss federal budget, the possibilities for legal enforcement or even individual legal protection are indeed only indirect and very limited. Still, expanding legal measures for enforcing standards under the current financial legislation would be alien to the system and cannot be accomplished without additional friction between their enforcement and other financial laws and policies. In addition to simply expanding enforcement capabilities, it is worth considering and evaluating alternatives. It is especially recommended to continuously examine whether current budget laws are compatible with and suitable for achieving a medium- to long-term budget balance.

The USA Federal Debt-to-GDP Ratio and The Unified Budget Act’s Lack of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles

Here in the beginning of 2021, two of the truly relevant federal public finance issues are presented in this article. One is the Debt-to GDP Ratio. The second topic is the true nature of deficits, surpluses and future liabilities treated in budgets constructed via the Unified Budget Act. Two graphs on these issues are included. This article shows that the present Debt-to-GDP ratio is relatively high, as if the nation similar to when the United States was in a period of a major war. This graph is shown in this article’s Figure 1. There has been evidence in the macroeconomic literature that indicates a high Debt-to-GDP ratio can possibly result in some degree of slowed economic growth. Though the literature is varied on that point. The reason for the possible crowding out effect has to do with the competition for loanable funds. There is competition from both the public and private demanders of those loanable funds. Furthermore, there is the reality that all federal trust fund balances of the United States must be used to hold U.S. Treasury bonds. For figure 2, two categories on U.S trust funds are shown. One category is the combined total of Social Security. Medicare, Disability and related funds. This is shown in a red line. All the other federal trust funds are indicated in a blue line. There is a graph that shows these two lines. The graph is of the percentage share between the two categories. As a result, the red and blue lines are inverse functions of each other. Over the eighty-year period (1940-2020), there has been variation if both the red and blue lines. The goal of this articles is for leaders and government analysts to be more aware of the issues of the USA Federal Debt to GDP Ratio and the Unified Budget Act’s lack of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Finances of the Nation: Provincial Debt Sustainability in Canada: Demographics, Federal Transfers, and COVID-19

In this article, Trevor Tombe examines the sustainability of Canada's public debt in the face of steadily rising provincial debt, a severe economic shock from COVID-19, and mounting health-care costs associated with an aging population. He finds that while the federal debt is solidly sustainable, despite a large increase owing to COVID-19, the debt burden of most provincial governments is not. He discusses some of the policy options available to improve fiscal outlooks, focusing in particular on reform of federal transfers.

CHOICE OF THE OPTIMAL STRATEGY IN THE MARKET WITH PERFECT COMPETITION

This article discusses the issue of choosing the optimal competitive strategy in markets with perfect competition. In the context of the rapid development of digital technologies, more and more market segments are subject to commoditization, which leads, on the one hand, to an essential depersonalization of suppliers of goods, works and services, and on the other hand, to the choice made by the consumer solely on the basis of price criteria. Over the past two decades, there has been a market segment in the Russian economy that is inherently close to perfectly competitive markets – the sub-federal debt market of the Russian Federation. The structure of the subfederal debt market, formed by numerous suppliers (credit organizations) and consumers (constituent entities of the Federation), and transparent bidding mechanisms existing under the Russian antitrust laws, combined with the uniformity of the goods being traded (cash loan) make it possible to consider it a market with perfect competition. But, unlike the classical commodity market, credit market transactions are characterized by the duration of the active interaction of the creditor (supplier) and the debtor (consumer), since the loan is provided for a certain period, after which it must be repaid with payment of all interest due. Thus, the behavior of the creditor bank is determined not only by the market situation at the time of the transaction, but also by the change in the state of the debtor during the loan period. With this in mind, the task of choosing the optimal market strategy becomes non-linear and can be solved using numerical methods of modeling the trading process.