Looking further ahead, our challenge, once we recover from this crisis, is to again rebuild our fiscal buffers. We have done it before and we will do it again.
But it will not be by undertaking any sharp pivots towards austerity.
For fiscal consolidation should be sustainable, it should rely on gradual changes that are made over time and that provide the foundation for a growing, thriving economy.
When we do transition into the second phase of the strategy, we will act in accordance with the principles that we have laid out, namely to focus on growing the economy in order to stabilise and reduce debt, to target a budget balance on average over the course of the economic cycle that is consistent with that debt objective.
We will do this by controlling expenditure growth while maintaining efficiency and quality of government spending and guaranteeing the delivery of essential services.
