There is also no simple formula for adjustment. Countries vary with respect to the severity of their imbalances, the composition of their imbalances and their fiscal capacity to absorb additional tax increases rather than relying on reductions in spending. The recent literature on fiscal consolidation has focused especially on tax increases versus expenditure reductions, but dealing with longer-term fiscal gaps requires a different focus. For example, given their importance as a source of fiscal gaps, reform of pension and healthcare systems is clearly a central agenda item for many advanced countries.
Some countries, such as Italy, have already introduced pension reforms in recent years and face much lower fiscal gaps as a result — if these pension reforms can be sustained. Healthcare reform is a more complex issue. It does not simply deal with a system of taxes and transfers but also with the structure of a very large and complex series of markets and the incentives associated with their operations. This means that even with expenditure reforms, rising expenditures as a share of GDP may be inevitable, making tax increases a necessary condition for fiscal balance. But with a longer planning horizon tax increases can take a variety of forms, including opening the possibility of more structural reforms which are more efficient than simply increasing marginal tax rates.
Finally, fiscal gaps that are attributable to large implicit liabilities are not easy to deal with through traditional budget control mechanisms that focus on explicit debt and short-term deficits. Indeed, policies to deal immediately with long-term fiscal gaps could over the short term result in large, though temporary, budget surpluses (in order to accommodate longer-term spending growth). The ability of the political process to sustain such surpluses is certainly questionable.
These challenges require new approaches to budget control. One such measure would be to introduce or strengthen the role of independent fiscal councils or budget authorities. These institutions could improve transparency, expose gaps in logic and provide support for needed changes in fiscal policy that may require implementation over a number of years.
The great recession left nearly all advanced economies with substantially higher debt-to-GDP ratios and in many cases with lingering economic weakness that further complicates short-term efforts at fiscal consolidation. But the longer-term challenges these countries face are in many cases related much more to the future fiscal challenge of growing primary deficits, associated with the cost of providing pensions and health care in the face of growing old-age dependency ratios, and not simply reducing overall debt.