Australian governments have recently moved from cash accounting to accrual accounting. Accrual accounting has been accompanied at the national government level by the introduction of a new key fiscal policy measure: the ‘fiscal balance’. This paper explains and evaluates this new fiscal...

The golden rule of public finance is based upon the notion that intergenerational equity requires that the cost of public expenditures be spread over time in a manner that reflects the intertemporal distribution of the benefits generated by those expenditures. This is often translated into a...