Off-Budgetary Reasons of the Growing Public Indebtedness

The interpretation of the relation between a budget deficit and a government debt in the standard economic theory is based on its unilateral causality, where the government debt comes into being due to the accumulation of budget deficits. The logic of the development of the government indebtedness is, in this approach, unambiguously determined by public finance processes monitored by Parliament in the framework of the course of fiscal years. The main objective of this paper is to stress that in reality the development of government indebtedness is significantly influenced by off-budgetary factors. The presented results endorse the hypothesis that the influence of stock-flow adjustment on the development of the debt/GDP ratio in a number of cases surpasses the influence of the budget balance. This trend significantly amplifies in the period of a financial crisis in context of the massive shift of the debt burden, occurring in the course of them.