A (very) short history of UK fiscal rules
Earlier this week the UK Government announced its new fiscal rule, which defines the fiscal envelope. For those of you who aren’t British, the deficit exceeded 10% of GDP during the recession and fiscal sustainability has become an important political issue, even for people who aren’t econ junkies! Unfortunately, this new rule is unlikely to encourage the sort of sustainability that the Government is hoping for. To understand why, I’m going to write a short series of posts on fiscal rules. This first post will briefly review the history of fiscal rules in the UK. For people who love technical details, this paper by Simon Wren-Lewis and Jonathan Portes is a great review and I’ll be coming back to it later.
A fiscal rule is simply a set of objectives that guide and constrain the Government as it makes policy. The rule usually comprises targets for debt and the deficit, with many variations in the details. Rules were introduced to the UK in 1997 by the then-Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Since then they have had a rocky history, as the chart shows:
