Fiscal Policy Trends: Alberta’s Government Spending: How Big a Problem?

The fiscal adjustment that Alberta will have to undertake to put its budget on a sustainable path was a topic of discussion at the September 20th School of Public Policy event on Learning from the Past: Moving towards Alberta’s Fiscal Future. This leads to the question – Should the fiscal adjustment be on the spending side of the budget or on the revenue side? In other words – Does Alberta have a spending problem or a revenue problem? This brief provides some insights into this question by comparing the level of provincial government expenditure relative to provincial household income. That is, what percentage of household incomes do provincial expenditures represent? And, how has that changed over time