Fiscal gap Fiscal gap The fiscal gap is a measure of a government's total indebtedness proposed by economists Laurence Kotlikoff and Alan Auerbach, who define it as the difference between the present value of all of government's projected financial obligations, including future expenditures, including servicing outstanding official federal debt, and the present value of all projected future tax and other receipts, including income accruing from the government's current ownership of financial assets. According to Kotlikoff and Auerbach, the "fiscal gap" accounting method can be used to calculate the percentage of necessary tax increases or spending reductions needed to close the fiscal gap
Fiscal capacity cannot improve fiscal capacity by simply raising taxes if it does not have a political, legal and fiscal history that has supported such state-power. In comparison to Besley and Persson's individual level study, Gordon and Li (2009) focus on the role of businesses and the financial sector in developed versus developing countries. They model businesses' participation in the financial sector—where Gordon and Li specifically refer to participation in the financial sector as using banks—as participation in the formal sector; they assume that tax authorities can monitor bank records, so that mass participation in the financial sector lends the state information