Consumption Subsidies Revisited
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33423/jabe.v27i1.7497Keywords:
business, economics, SNA, consumption subsidies, total consumption of the populationAbstract
The Japanese government launched the “GO TO Travel” campaign in late July, 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic to rescue beleaguered tourism industries by subsidizing travel expenses by 35%. The Cabinet Office, responsible for compiling national account statistics in Japan, determined that these subsidies should be treated as individual final consumption expenditures of the general government. This treatment implies that defrayal of these subsidies by the government was regarded as “consumption subsidies,” by using the term proposed by Jean-Claude Roman in 1985. However, the SNA in its 1993 version and in its 2008 version did not incorporate this concept. So, the Cabinet Office’s treatment is against the present SNA’s recommendations, though she changed the treatment by the end of November 2021. However, it may be worth reconsidering the concept and its treatment. In this paper, the author will review the discussion to clarify the key points involved.
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