"The Economics of Budget Deficits" provides a comprehensive overview of the scholarly literature exploring the causes and consequences of deficit spending and the public debt. Incorporating classical, Keynesian and public choice analyses of debt-financed public expenditures, the two volumes contain major theoretical and empirical contributions to the debate. They cover such critical fiscal policy issues as the history and measurement of budget deficits, the question of who bears the burden of the public debt, the use of deficits to solve problems of dynamic policy inconsistency and the...