Er lántaka hins opinbera undirstaða velmegunar og hagsældar?

Ég rakst á þennan texta á ferðalagi mínu um netið.  Textinn, sem er skrifaður af Igor Rõtov, ritstjóra Aripaev (Viðskiptadagurinn, Eistneskt dagblað um viðskipti).  Textanum hefur verið snarað yfir á Ensku á vefsíðunni, BBN (Baltic Business News), og hljóðar svo:

 

„After Estonia introduced the euro, we expected our economy to start growing strongly, catching up with the EU average. The reality has been quite different. We are now falling behind not only Europe, but also our neighbours whose economies continue to grow fast. Although not all EU countries have reported their first-quarter economic results, it seems that Estonia has fallen to the bottom of the back so the gap between Estonia and other economies seems to the widening.

Swedish economy, for instance, is expected to grow 2-3% this year and also Finland’s economy should be in positive territory on full-year results, to say nothing of Latvia and Lithuania that expanded 2.8% and 2.9%, respectively. Even Russia’s economy increased 0.8% a year.

According to Finance Minister Jürgen Ligi the Estonian economy weakened as a result of a warm winter due to low added value in the production of electricity. But was our winter so much worse than in Latvia? After all, our wages have continued to increase and the unemployment keeps decreasing.

It may be, of course, that Statistics Estonia has made a mistake and the figure will be adjusted when final results are known.
Another and more plausible possibility is that the government has in recent years taken a wrong course.

Not surprisingly, Finance Minister Jürgen Ligi said, commenting Q1 results, that Estonian state must remain conservative in its spending.

In my opinion the Estonian political elite is mesmerized by the idea of low government loan burden and this has become the real obstacle which is restricting Estonia’s economic growth.
We are moving in a different direction than the rest of the world as we want to avoid increasing the government loan burden.

Estonian government’s loan burdern of 10% of GDP makes us by far the most fiscally conservative country in the Eurozone.

Luxembourg that is second to Estonia has borrowed more than 20% of its GDP. Worldwide, the list of countries that have government borrowing around 10% of GDP includes Russia, Azerbaidjan, Uzbekistan and Iran. Is this the group of companies that we want to belong to?

For example, if Estonia’s loan burden were as high as in Luxembourg, we would have another 2 billion euros to spend. If we had the same level as Latvia or Sweden, we would have an extra 4 billion. In case of Finland, 6 billion euros.

Just imagine what a boost this money could give to our ailing economy.

Of course, there is always an alternative to go on living in a contracting economy, continuing to cut costs and hoping that one day things will improve on their own. I do not believe in this alternative.

Textan má finna hér.

Það er ekki nýtt að halda því fram að stórauka þurfi eyðslu hins opinbera (yfirleitt með lánum) og það sé lykillinn að velmegun og hagsæld.  Og vissulega getur lántaka verið réttlætanleg, sé reiknað með því að féð sé notað til hluta sem séu arðbærir til lengri tíma litið og geti þannig staðið undir þeim afborgunum, sem eðilega fylgja lántökum.  Auki tekjur hins opinbera, jafnt sem þegnanna.

En það er einmitt sem því miður er oft raunin með opinbera lántöku að hún skilar ekki því sem vonast er eftir, og skuldir hækka sífellt og æ stærra hlutfall af tekjum fer í vexti og afborganir.

Líklega eru mörg ríki sem myndu vilja hafa svipað skuldahlutfall og Eistland og geta notað það fé sem þau þurfa að greiða í vexti og afborganir í annað.

Það er mun algengara að skuldir hins opinbera séu taldar of háar en of lágar, en hvert "rétt" eða eðilegt skuldahlutfall er, er líklega nokkuð sem um eru skiptar skoðanir.