Purpose and Prologue

Balance sheets and accounting have long been central to human decision-making. Yet governments place little importance on understanding or managing their balance sheets. To consider the implications of this requires a wide-ranging approach. This should encompass history, which offers perspectives on how we got to our current situation and on potential solutions; accounting, which provides a framework for allocating resources and measuring the outputs they produce; demographics, which determines the future costs of meeting modern expectations for public services. Taken together, these disciplines can offer us an understanding of long-term government financial sustainability; of how governments can improve the efficiency with which they manage assets and liabilities; of intergenerational fairness. The challenges are greatest for highly developed economies—represented by the G7. The consequences of failure will be momentous for the global economic system.