General public services

We are governed by 6 different governments, and they are often accused of eating up an exorbitant amount of money. Let's see where our "general public services" money is going!

Compared to the European average

Greedy government

Government cost should scale with the amount of people living in the country and in some natural money/person unit, which I again take to be the net average wage. The resulting linear model has an r2 score of 0.974.

We can therefore use this scale to compare the total budget with

Once again we find the typical belgian story. Above average, but not an outlier.

Debt

We have quite a bit of debt, sometimes described as "crippling" - but is it so? To start with, let's compare our debt/gdp to other countries.

Because of our above average debt, we do have to spend a slightly more than most other countries.

I want to mention that debt is not an inherently bad thing. We are not balancing the checkbook of a regular person - a country is a different beast entirely. For example, it may be beneficial to go into debt if it sufficiently boosts your future GDP. Too much debt can become a problem when you have to pay larger and larger fractions of your taxation revenue to paying of interest, at the cost of other investments. Historically, this fraction has been trending down :

A lot of debt will also make it more expensive for the government to lend new capital. A new loan is seen as more risky, and lenders therefore demand a higher return on investment. A standard measure for this rate is the yield on a 10-year government bond.

We see that Belgium, despite the quite impressive amount of debt, is still seen as a relatively safe investment. That is not to say that our debt shouldn't ideally come down.