The budget for the first three months was very tight: counting in only the items we really have financed, we had a central-government budget deficit of about 1.5% of GDP.

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The central government's share of the budget deficit looks like being 2.7 points less in the first ten months of this year than in 2009, and the tax take is up by 10%.

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"Increases in the official defense budget are roughly consistent with GDP growth and constitute a declining percentage of central government expenditures, " wrote Adam Liff, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, and Andrew Erickson, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

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Far from using its fast-rising revenues (let alone issuing more debt) to finance pro-poor programmes, the government has stressed its goal of further reducing the central budget deficit.

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And in Greece, the government of former central banker Lucas Papademos has passed its first budget promising to reduce the deficit without further austerity measures.

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The economy will emerge from its troubles only when the government contains the budget deficit, says Cho Soon, a former governor of the central bank and now an opposition politician.

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This is startling at a time when the central government's budget deficit is ballooning following repeated and massive dollops of fiscal stimulus.

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