How can governments keep all the balls in the air?

Governments around the world are performing a juggling act: trying to meet the demands for more government spending; keeping their taxes competitive, and avoiding their public debts spiralling out of control.

In many cases, these commitments to social provision means that the increase is unavoidable: state pension payments will rise as the populations age and healthcare spending faces similar demographic problems, coupled with the demand for better services made available by technological improvements and new developments in medicine.  Pressures on other government spending are also intense: to provide better policing, defence, environmental protection and aid to poorer countries, and, in some economies, to return to the state control industries that were privatised in the 1980s and 1990s. ...