Niektoré súvislosti medzi konsolidáciou verejných financií a hospodárskym rastom
ON A DEPENDENCE BETWEEN PUBLIC FINANCE CONSOLIDATION AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Summary/Abstract: During the years 1996–1998 a discrepancy in the public finance originated and became worth in Slovakia. In order to get some knowledge that could be helpful for the process of public finance consolidation in the Slovak Republic, this article analyses the whole process that occurred in OECD countries under a different historical background. The chart No. 1 shows that the situation with governmental finance significantly improved especially in the years when the GDP grew faster or when it was kept on a positive level. However, the dependency between the government finance and the economic growth results (as it is quite clear from the chart) was not always uncompromising. The gov-ernment finance results shown as a budget balance ratio (deficit or surplus) to GDP were in all examined countries affected by the budget receipt and outlay development trends which were to a certain extent independent from the economy performance de-velopment in a respective economy. It is very obvious from the chart that during the examined period the public finance, regarding all countries included, were found from time to time in a crises and subse-quently in the consolidation. The chart testifies a relative independence between the public finance development and the trends of economic growth being always and eve-rywhere only a short phenomenon, and in accordance with that the government finance consolidation is actually an attempt to harmonize their development with the GDP de-velopment. In addition, the chart in a graphical way described that the balance recovery strategy based on an expansive financial policy was applied only during a short time – and it happened in the year when the recovery sank down to the recession bottom. A notable increase of budgetary spendings in the following years led to the economic growth reco-very, the improved governmental finance development and through that we witnessed a medium consolidation period of the governmental finance. When reviewing the implementation of the expansive financial policy on behalf of strengthening the macroeconomic balance, we should notice that: Firstly, the contemplated strategy was exploited mainly in all examined countries, although, as we have already mentioned, in all cases only shortly. Secondly, the state budget spendings expansion was used as a tool for overcoming the decline in economic recovery especially in the 70s and in the first half of 80s. Due to swings of the economic policy from the Keynessian approach in the 80s, some impulses for financial expansion were introduced in order to expand the demand and in such a way to overcome the recession. But it happened rarely.

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