Fiscal sustainability report – June 2015

Our annual Fiscal sustainability report sets out long-term projections for spending, revenue and financial transactions, and assesses whether they imply a sustainable path for public sector debt. The FSR also analyses the health of the public sector’s balance sheet using both conventional National Accounts measures and the Whole of Government Accounts prepared using commercial accounting principles.

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Fiscal sustainability report - June 2015

June 11, 2015 – 2 MB

Supporting documents

Supplementary documents

Information or data which has been released as a result of external requests, since the original publication of the main document.

Presentations

Boxes

Within each of our key publications we include topical ‘boxes’. These self-contained analyses are unique to this publication and tend to cover recent developments in the economy or public finances that complement the main discussion of our analyses.

Age-related spending projections in Europe

Age-related spending projections in Europe
Our 2015 long-term fiscal projections suggested that, if left unaddressed, the public sector finances would have come under increasing pressure over the next 50 years due to rising age-related expenditure. This box compared our long-term age related spending projections with projections from the Ageing Working Group (2015) for the EU countries between 2020 and 2060.

Economy categories: Labour market, Population and migration

Fiscal categories: Public spending, Education, Departmental spending, Health

Cross-cutting categories: International comparisons, Ageing population, Demographics

Economic cycles and the long-term projections

Economic cycles and the long-term projections
In our 2015 Fiscal sustainability report, we assumed that GDP grows in line with its historical trend. This in effect implied 47 years of uninterrupted trend economic growth in our central projections. This box considered the alternative paths for debt as a share of GDP under an symmetric and asymmetric cycle, highlighting the sensitivity of the net debt projections to economic cycles.

Economy categories: Nominal GDP, Output gap

Fiscal categories: Public sector net debt, Primary balance

Drivers of rising health spending

Drivers of rising health spending
Health spending rose faster than GDP in almost all European countries over the past decade. This box investigated most notable long-term drivers of real spending on health care: demographic effects, income effects and other cost pressures.

Economy categories: Labour market, Productivity, GDP by income, Population and migration

Fiscal categories: Health, Public spending, Departmental spending

Cross-cutting categories: Ageing population, Demographics, International comparisons