Fiscal policy and Fiscal deficit

Fiscal policy is a medium through which a government balances its tax rates and spending to monitor and influence a country’s economy. It is the sister strategy to monetary policy by which a central government affects a nation’s money supply. Both the policies are helpful in several combinations to govern a country’s economic goals. The blog will talk about how fiscal policy works, how it should monitor and how the implementation of the policy will influence the fiscal deficit. 

What is a fiscal deficit?

• It arrives when the government’s income is scarce with its spending. It means a government striving with the shortfall is spending more than it receives. The deficit is calculated as an overall percentage of the GDP or total money spent more than income. 
• The income figure only incorporates revenues and taxes and eliminates money borrowed to cover the scarcity. The concept is very different from fiscal debt. 
• It is analysed at the time of the Budget as the size of the deficit impacts the price stability, inflation, cost of production, growth and country’s ratings. 

What is Fiscal Policy?

• Fiscal policy refers to optimizing government tax policies and spending to affect economic conditions, mainly the macroeconomic conditions, including employment, economic growth, inflation and demand for goods and services. 
• The policy is often compared with monetary policy regulated by central bankers instead of any elected government officials. 

How fiscal policy operates?

• The operation of the fiscal policy is based on the suggestion of British economist John Maynard Keynes. The economist argued that economic recessions follow the scarcity of business investment components and consumer spending of aggregate demand. 
• He believed that a governing body could regulate economic output and stabilize the business cycle by balancing tax policies and spending to cover the insufficiency of private sectors. 
• John’s theories evolved in reaction to the Great Depression, which escaped classical economic assumptions that the economic swings were rectifying by themselves. His ideas were highly impactful, resulting in the New Deal in the U.S., involving massive spending on social welfare programs and public works projects. 

How does the policy impact the fiscal deficit?

As discussed, fiscal policy optimizes the government budget to influence the economy. It involves government spending and levied taxes. Although, the policy is influential when the government meets the budget deficit. For instance, the taxes and infrastructure get lower. In such a situation, the policies are helpful to boost the economy and productivity. 

Inversely, the policy contradicts when the tax rises and government spending decreases. It helps a government to combat increasing inflation. However, an expansionary policy results in a higher budget deficit and a contractionary policy decreases the budget deficits. 

What is monetary policy?

• Monetary policy is a collection of tools that a country’s central bank uses to advance sustainable growth by regulating the overall money supply stored in its bank, its businesses and its consumers. 
• It is a central bank’s actions that manage the money supply. They optimize monetary policy to reduce unemployment, reduce inflation and encourage moderate long-term interest rates. 
• It works in-hand with a country’s fiscal policy. Government leaders get re-elected for increasing spending and decreasing taxes. As a response, the governing body opts for an expansionary fiscal policy. 

Tools of monetary policy?

There are three standard tools of the policy- 

• Open market operations (OMO)- A Central bank uses the OMO to create new money by buying government securities, such as issuing new money and treasury bonds. The Central bank then contracts the money supply by selling those securities from its balance sheet and removing them from circulation. 

• The Reserve requirement- When the central banks inform their members of the money they have to keep on reserve every night. Not every person needs their money every day; thus, it is safe for banks to lend most of those amounts. 

In this way, they have sufficient cash in hand to fulfil maximum demands for redemption. However, when the central bank restricts liquidity, it increases the reserve requirement. Similarly, when they expand liquidity, they lower the reserve requirement. 

• Discount rate- A discount rate defines the charges on borrowed funds from the discount window by the central bank to its members. 

Conclusion 

A fiscal deficit is the biggest scarcity problem for a country. It arrives when the government of a country spends more than it receives from the economy. It is analysed by subtracting total income from the total expenditure. To cover the shortage of funds, the re-elected government leaders introduced the Fiscal policy. It directs the government to decide how much money they should spend and how much they should earn from their economic activity. However, their monetary policy also helps them control their money supply and increase their overall economic growth.