government, consistent with the macroeconomic programming objectives, externalaccounts conditions, supplementary policy instruments, and other behavioral assumptions.

The model presented here should be thought of as part of a broader macroeconomic framework for an economy, one fundamental purpose of which is to determine whether a specified government expenditure program would be fully financed if its economy's performance were to turn out according to the vector of programming objectives. The narrower purpose of the present model is to determine the financing flows that would be available to finance the public deficit if the vector of programming assumptions were to occur. That is, the present model is part of a macroeconomic "consistency" analysis. Economists sometimes disparage consistency exercises of this kind as "just simple adding-up exercises," noting, fairly enough, that they represent no general- or partialequilibration processes and incorporate only limited assumptions about behavioral responses to incentives. Consistency models can be useful, however, when used appropriately. It would be methodologically inappropriate, for example, to use the present model for prediction: the fact that the model indicates that a given public deficit would be consistent with a given assumption vector by no means implies that the deficit and assumption vector are likely to occur. It would also be inappropriate to claim that the present model simulates the actual macroeconomic processes leading to the outcomes represented by the programming vector. The most appropriate applications of the model described here would undoubtedly be macroeconomic resource-planning exercises. It would be helpful to a policy analyst, for example, to determine that a particular programmed government deficit would require a larger flow of saving and credit resources than the assumption vector would imply. A claim of consistency is a claim of one kind of feasibility-i.e., in this model, resource adequacy. An inconsistent deficit and assumption vector would presumably not both be possibie, and so such models can be used to reject unfeasible deficit-vector pairings. While this may seem unexciting for analysts aiming to predict the future, in many contexts this kind of determination can be useful for policy planning exercises.

Consistency exercises of this kind are carried out daily by national macroeconomic policy-makers, with varying degrees of detail and variations in methodology. The International Monetary Fund's basic monetary programming analysis is a consistency exercise, as is the World Bank's RMSM-X model. (The familiar Leontiev "input-output" model is another kind of consistency exercise: one way of describing its purpose is that it determines whether an economy's resource base is consistent with prograrnmed output.) Several particular features of the present model should be noted at the outset. It takes account not only of the central bank's balance sheet (stock and flow), but also of the central bank's own profit flow. (This is often called "the quasi-fiscal" surplus, although in some countries the expression also refers to other public-sector surpluses or deficits not counted in the main government accounts.) In itself, a central-bank profit flow is a source of monetary absorption, while a loss flow is a source of monetary expansion. This can significantly affect an economy's monetary aggregates, and may thereby significantly increase or reduce the maximum allowable net government borrowing flow. For exarnple, interest eamed on international reserves is part of a central bank's internationalreserve inflow. Since in most cases this interest is capitalized into the international4