in addition to strengthening automatic stabilizers to reduce vulnerability to shocks and job losses governments should also adopt short and longterm policies to mitigate the adverse impacts of economic reforms the fact is that there are many targets and there are many instruments how you map the instruments onto the targets and how you use these instruments best is a very complicated problem as noted earlier social wage provisioning through subsidized public education health care housing etc therefore fiscal policy should be judged from the perspective of its impacts on productivity and employment and not merely from a simplistic accounting perspective of balancing the budget in all circumstances