Deficit politics and surplus politics: a comparative study of Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

Traditionally, budgetary scholars focus on deficit politics in Western democracies, emphasizing budgetary conflicts among budgetary actors over different strategies to balance budgets. While most countries are facing budget deficits, some countries and regions are experiencing budget surpluses. However, surplus politics, and its comparison with deficit politics, remains underexplored. This study is a pioneer attempt to compare the similarities and differences between deficit politics and surplus politics, using Hong Kong and Singapore as binary cases.

Notes

1 The World Bank Data. Public Sector - Cash Surplus/Deficit (% of GDP). https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/wdi-database-archives-(beta)/series/GC.BAL.CASH.GD.ZS. Assessed 6 September 2016.

2 For an overview of Hong Kong’s public finance system, see Cheung (2006) and Fong (2015).

3 Article V of Annex I of the Sino-British Joint Declaration stipulated that “The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall deal on its own with financial matters, including disposing of its financial resources and drawing up its budgets and its final accounts.”. For full-text of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, see: http://www.cmab.gov.hk/en/issues/joint.htm.

4 For full-text of the Articles 106 to 108 of the Basic Law, see: http://www.basiclaw.gov.hk.

5 For an overview of Singapore’s public finance system, see Asher (1989).

6 For full-text of Article 147(4a), Article 142(3), and Article 144(2) of the Singaporean constitution, see: https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/CONS1963.

7 Both the Hong Kong and Singaporean governments have habitually practiced their fiscal conservatism by manipulating the formulation and presentation of their budgets. Hong Kong government has, for many years, habitually made conservative economic and budget forecasts, aiming to provide a cover for its restrained welfare spending—the actual budgets always turned out to be huge surpluses in the next fiscal year (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2018). Similarly, the Singaporean government is also found to have habitually downplayed its revenues such as land sales and played up many expenditures that are by nature capital top-ups to endowment and trust funds. Such budgeting practices have resulted in either the under-statement of budget surpluses or over-statement of budget deficits (The Straits Times, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this article was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. EdUHK 18600417).

Notes on contributors

Brian C. H. Fong

Brian C. H. Fong is Associate Professor and Founding Associate Director of The Academy of Hong Kong Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. Specialized in great-power competition, democratization, and identity politics, he has produced more than 65 publications including a number of articles in top SSCI journals, including Democratization, Nations and Nationalism, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, International Review of Administrative Sciences, China Quarterly, Modern China, and Asian Survey. He is also the first editor of several comparative politics books, including China’s Influence and the Centre-periphery Tug of War in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Indo-Pacific and Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies.