Draft:Public Net Worth

Public Net Worth: Accounting, Government and Democracy (Palgrave, 2024) is a non-fiction book, co-authored by Ian Ball, Willem Buiter, John Crompton, Dag Detter and Jacob Soll.

It covers in depth the subject of Public (Sector) Net Worth.

The book has won critical acclaim from several international economists.

It was selected by Martin Wolf as one of Financial Times "Best summer books of 2024: Economics".

Overview
The book explains how accrual accounting works, and how it can be applied to government financial management, using the example of New Zealand, which has successfully managed its finances on this basis for over two decades. It also draws extensively on IMF working papers comparing the public sector balance sheets of a broad group of economies, and projecting the path that the balance sheets of the systemically-important (and demographically-challenged) G7 countries will take over the next two generations. For less-developed and emerging market economies, the key message is that the sooner they adopt a net worth– and balance sheet–focused approach to public financial management, the less likely they are to repeat some of the mistakes of more developed economies.