State budget revenues and expenditures.

Government budgetis a legal document that is often passed by the legislature, and approved by the chief executive-or president.

The two basic elements of any budget are the revenues and expenses. In the case of the government, revenues are derived primarily from taxes. Government expenses include spending on current goods and services, which economists call government consumption; government investment expenditures such as infrastructure investment or research expenditure; and transfer payments like unemployment or retirement benefits.

Budgets have an economic, political and technical basis. Unlike a pure economic budget, they are not entirely designed to allocate scarce resources for the best economic use. They also have a political basis wherein different interests push and pull in an attempt to obtain benefits and avoid burdens. The technical element is the forecast of the likely levels of revenues and expenses.

The "Public Choice" approach to public finance seeks to explain how self-interested voters, politicians, and bureaucrats actually operate, rather than how they should operate.

Government expenditures.Economists classify government expenditures into three main types:

· Government purchases of goods and services for current use are classed as government consumption.

· Investments - Government purchases of goods and services intended to create future benefits, such as infrastructure investment or research spending.

· Transfer payments. Government expenditures that are not purchases of goods and services, and instead just represent transfers of money, such as social security payments.

Income distribution -some forms of government expenditure are specifically intended to transfer income from some groups to others. For example, governments sometimes transfer income to people that have suffered a loss due to natural disaster. Likewise, public pension programs transfer wealth from the young to the old.

Other forms of government expenditure which represent purchases of goods and services also have the effect of changing the income distribution. For example, engaging in a war may transfer wealth to certain sectors of society. Public education transfers wealth to families with children in these schools. Public road construction transfers wealth from people that do not use the roads to those people that do (and to those that build the roads).

· Income Security

· Employment insurance

· Health Care

Governmentrevenue

Government revenue comes primarily from taxes but includes all amounts of money received from sources outside the government entity. Large governments usually have an agency or department responsible for collecting government revenue from companies and individuals

Taxes -A tax is a financial charge or other levy imposed on an individual or a legal entity by a state or a functional equivalent of a state (for example, tribes, secessionist movements or revolutionary movements). Taxes could also be imposed by a subnational entity. Taxes consist of direct tax or indirect tax, and may be paid in money or as corvée labor

Debt -Governments, like any other legal entity, can take out loans, issue bonds and make financial investments. Government debt is moneyowed by any level of government; either central government, federal government, municipal government or local government.

As the government represents the people, government debt can be seen as an indirect debt of the taxpayers. Government debt can be categorized as internal debt, owed to lenders within the country, and external debt, owed to foreign lenders.

Seigniorage -is the net revenue derived from the issuing of currency. It arises from the difference between the face value of a coin or bank note and the cost of producing, distributing and eventually retiring it from circulation. Seigniorage is an important source of revenue for some national banks.

Public goods

  • characteristics of public goods are non - excludability and transferable. Non excludability means the consumption of the goods is not limited on specific group of consumers, that is the satisfaction of the people watching fireworks display is not limited to the owners of the fireworks. The transferability feature of the public goods means that the consumption of an individual will not lead to deprive the other, that is, if a consumer is doing fishing on a pond, another person may do fishing as well on the same pond.
  • The demand for pure public goods
  • Efficient output of a pure public good

The free rider problem

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