What will happen to government spending in the world's biggest economies by 2017? Just how low will the US and the UK go?
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Just how low will government spending go? This data from the International Monetary Fund's October economic outlook shows that the answer for the UK and the US is very low indeed.
UK government spending will shrink from 45.46% of GDP this year to 39.17% in 2017 - a fall of 6.29%-points. That's the biggest drop of any developed country and only Ireland and Greece will see bigger drops.
The US is going down too - from 40.65% to 39.39%, a drop of 1.26%-points.
Aditya Chakrabortty writes that
what it shows is that the UK will plunge from public spending on a par with Germany in 2009, to spending less than the US by 2017. Had France, Sweden or Canada been included on this graph, the UK would still come bottom. If George Osborne gets his way, within the next five years, Britain will have a smaller public sector than any other major developed nation.
Fan or critic, nearly everyone now agrees that this government wants to shrink the state, but very few take on board what that means. This graph shows just how radical those ministerial plans are. Particularly striking is the fact that Britain will end up spending less as a proportion of its national income than even the US, the international byword for a decrepit public sector
It puts the UK below the US, Spain, Greece, Germany, Japan, and France in spending as a proportion of economic output. It moves from 15th in the list of IMF developed countries in 2000 to 25 in 2017, the biggest drop of any major economy.
It doesn't entirely reflect projected falls in GDP either - the IMF projects that the UK will actually see some of the biggest GDP growth of any of these countries by 2017.
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