page_title: Sectoral balances
hierarchical_section_title: Sectoral balances
caption_attribution_description: English: Sectoral Financial Balances in U.S. Economy 1990-2012
context_page_description: The sectoral balances are a sectoral analysis framework for macroeconomic analysis of national economies developed by British economist Wynne Godley.
  Sectoral analysis is based on the insight that when the government sector has a budget deficit, the non-government sectors together must have a surplus, and vice-versa. In other words, if the government sector is borrowing, the other sectors taken together must be lending. The balances represent an accounting identity resulting from rearranging the components of aggregate demand, showing how the flow of funds affects the financial balances of the three sectors.
  This corresponds approximately to Balances Mechanics developed by Wolfgang Stützel in the 1950s. The approach is used by scholars at the Levy Economics Institute to support macroeconomic modelling and by Modern Monetary Theorists to illustrate the relationship between government budget deficits and private saving.
context_section_description: The sectoral balances (also called sectoral financial balances) are a sectoral analysis framework for macroeconomic analysis of national economies developed by British economist Wynne Godley. 
   Sectoral analysis is based on the insight that when the government sector has a budget deficit, the non-government sectors (private domestic sector and foreign sector) together must have a surplus, and vice-versa. In other words, if the government sector is borrowing, the other sectors taken together must be lending. The balances represent an accounting identity resulting from rearranging the components of aggregate demand, showing how the flow of funds affects the financial balances of the three sectors. 
  This corresponds approximately to Balances Mechanics developed by Wolfgang Stützel in the 1950s. The approach is used by scholars at the Levy Economics Institute to support macroeconomic modelling and by Modern Monetary Theorists to illustrate the relationship between government budget deficits and private saving.
caption: Sectoral financial balances in U.S. economy 1990-2017. By definition, the three balances must net to zero. Since 2008, the foreign sector surplus and private sector surplus have been offset by a government budget deficit.[2][3]
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