Chapter 3 | Page 112 including: reducing low priority spending; enhancing the government’s implementation capacity; better targeting subsidies and transfer programmes; and rationalising administered prices of publicly provided goods and services.48 The ability of the State to fulfil ESC rights can be seen as primarily based on government resources, because without these resources, government’s ability to provide the goods and services required for the realisation of rights will be limited.49 On the other hand, even those governments with adequate resources may still fail to implement the policies and establish institutions for the realisation of ESC rights, simply because they lack the political will to do so. Public sector revenue can be categorised as tax revenue, non-tax revenue and debt and deficit financing. The collection and disbursement of government revenue and government interventions in the provision of goods and services are best understood within the context of public goods, externalities, and market failure.50 Government revenue and expenditure can be evaluated against ‘socially optimal’ policy outcomes, which brings into consideration the choices of action available to economic agents―policymakers and public consumers.51 Whereas the neoclassical economic approach favours reduced government intervention in the economy through lower taxation and government revenue and reduced government expenditure, the developmental economists, mainly Keynesians and heterodox economists, favour greater involvement of the government in the economy through revenue raising and increased expenditure.52 This view also supports government borrowing and debt financing as a means to provide social infrastructure and ensure the protection of the most vulnerable. Many poor countries, however, 48 The World Bank, South Asia Economic Focus: Creating Fiscal Space through Revenue Mobilization (The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2012), <http://www-wds.worldbank.org xi. 49 Lanse Minkler and Shawna Sweeney, 'On the Indivisibility and Interdependence of Basic Rights in Developing Countries' (2011) 33(2) Human Rights Quarterly 351-396, 356-357. 50 Gareth D Myles, Public Economics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001). 51 Ibid. 52 For a review of history and theory of heterodox economics, see Lee, above n 18.

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