著者

一ノ瀬 篤 Atsushi Ichinose 桃山学院大学経済学部

出版者

桃山学院大学総合研究所

雑誌

桃山学院大学経済経営論集 (ISSN:02869721)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.50, no.1, pp.219-246[含 英語文要旨], 2008-06

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In the U.K., Pitt's sinking fund was established in 1786 to deal with the accumulation of national debt. Pitt's fund regarded the compound interest principle as important. The initial fund was supported by a budgetary surplus of some one million pounds. But as the nation rushed into the war with France in 1793, extraordinary budgetary deficits emerged. Under such circumstances, the sinking fund, which was founded on the principle of compound interest, was obliged to depend on the new issue of government bonds as its source. Consequently the sinking fund merely embodied a policy of' raising sinking funds by borrowing money'. Criticism against the wastefulness of Pitt's fund flared up after the war, the leading critics being R. Hamilton and D. Ricardo. As a result, the fund was abandoned in 1828 after more than 40 year's duration. Hamilton mainly criticized the policy of 'raising sinking funds by floating new government bonds', but he also never overlooked the fictitious nature of the compound interest principle. In the present-day Japan, National Debt Consolidation Fund(NDCF)bears the role of a sinking fund. Corresponding to the so-called re-flotation of national debt in 1965 F.Y., it was decided to annually transfer a sum of money(equal to 1.6% of the outstanding national debt at the beginning of the previous year)from government's general accounts to NDCF. The figure of 1.6% corresponds to the durable life of the facilities that the government was expected to build(in the case of construction bonds), and it was assumed the government would recover its investment in 60 years. NDCF was to deposit and employ this sum to redeem outstanding debts. Now, as this 1.6% deposit is inserted into the annual disbursements budget as a main item under bond expenditures, it unavoidably increases the sum of budgetary expenditures. Therefore, under the circumstances of persistent budgetary deficit, the sum of the above deposit increases the annual volume of newly issued government bonds by that very sum. The result is as follows: to meet the necessary sum for the sinking fund, the government is compelled to raise money by issuing new government bonds. Thus the scale of annual government revenue/expenditure is amplified to the same extent. If this waste of labor could be justified, it would be in the case where the sinking fund usefully fulfills the function of debt management, or in the case where the fund plays the role of emergency reserves. But neither function could be nor should be expected with regard to NDCF. Our present NDCF seems to continue only by inertia and only for the purpose of exhibiting the government's pose that it is not idle in trying to reduce the national debt. The sinking fund in present-day Japan has not employed the principle of compound interest, so that its fictitious character is not easily exposed. But it is not likely that we will be able to escape the unsparing criticisms made by Robert Hamilton some 200 years ago.