Featured Graphic: Public Spending, Austerity, and the Crisis

which is updated in April and October every year. The database includes a range of headline national accounts, monetary, trade, employment, and government finance statistics. It is useful because it provides data series from 1980 (where available) for all 184 countries and projects them forward to 2016. The selected graphs cover the period since the banking crisis from 2007 through the subsequent public spending and economic crises and consider possible developments in the future. Projections of this kind are inherently unstable, since external pressures, the aspirations of politicians, and the inertia of state commitments make GDP and public spending plans hard to realise. They serve as a good guide to the way in which policy makers in different countries understand the problems they face and the best way to address them. There are clear national differences. The graphs extracted here include the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, and US), plus others of interest: the three EU countries currently in receipt of bailout packages from the IMF and EU (Greece, Ireland, and Portugal) and Sweden, the exemplar for the Nordic growth model. Graph 1 reports patterns of GDP growth. The countries were all affected by the 2009 recession. Most recovered the lost growth within a year, but recovery is expected to be more gradual in Ireland, Portugal, and Greece. There are clear national differences in the resources lost through recession, proportionately more in Japan, Italy, and UK, and in the US which is omitted from the graph for technical reasons. Public spending patterns are rather different (graph 2). In all cases the recession creates a spike (stretching up to 2011 for Ireland, France, and some other countries). This results from lower GDP, the impact of automatic regulators, and discretionary spending on stimulus packages. Most countries anticipate returning to trend spending levels during the next three or four years as their economies revert to growth and retrenchment austerity packages taper, although austerity is expected to continue in most cases for considerably longer. The UK pattern is an exception: the plans envisage a sharp fall in spending as a cut-back programme unparalleled since the 1920s bites home, with the only countries cutting at a similar rate being Greece and Ireland. Public spending in the UK is expected to fall below the level in these countries by 2014. The trend continues as UK spending as a proportion of GDP falls below levels in traditionally lower spending Canada, Japan, and US a year later. Graph 3 shows how national debt is expected to rise in most countries, as governments borrow to finance recovery. The increases are rapid and attain very high levels in Japan, Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and are more moderate elsewhere, with Canada and Germany maintaining stable and relatively low debts. Assets outweigh debts in Sweden. The UK falls into a middle group with France and the US, experiencing moderate debt increases. The material from the website gives a useful indication of how politicians' pronouncements sometimes diverge from reality, and from the statistics their own governments are providing to the IMF. It also shows how patterns of public spending and recovery differ radically, perhaps an indication of a realignment of welfare states, with France moving away from other corporatist states to join the very high spenders and the UK abandoning aspirations to share European levels of social provision (seeTaylor-Gooby and Stoker, 2011). Featured graphic: Public spending, austerity, and the crisis Environment and Planning A 2011, volume 43, pages 1239 ^ 1241