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Appendices: 
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Slow economic growth worldwideEconomic contraction is forcing service reductions"More than a million Americans will lose publicly-funded healthcare. Crime-wracked Oakland, California, where the number of murders nearly doubled last year, is cutting millions from its police budget. Massachusetts won’t pay for dentures, eyeglasses or prosthetics for low-income residents anymore. Oregon public schoolchildren will likely attend 15 fewer days of classes. Ohio and Kentucky are closing prisons. Illinois is slashing child-care funds for welfare families by half. The Fire Department of New York, formerly the heroes of 9/11 but now just another costly line item in the city’s shrinking budget, is set to cut eight engine companies and reduce staffing on the remaining units from five firefighters to four."2
The worldwide economy is slowly recovering from a turbulent economic start to the 21st century. The worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate for advanced economies sank to less than one percent in 2001 and has struggled through 2002 and 2003.3 During 2002, North America experienced an abrupt end to over 18 years of economic growth. This period of radical economic shifts has left governments and public service organizations in the difficult position of having to rely on program cuts or painful tax increases to balance budgets when expected revenue predictions proved to be unreliable. In the United States, the effects of these sudden shifts have been traumatic. State governments are in the process of closing deficits for fiscal year 2003 that total nearly $80 billion. Budget deficits for fiscal year 2004 are estimated to exceed $70 billion. Most U.S. economists expect state fiscal problems to continue in fiscal year 2005, and further rounds of tax increases and program cuts will likely be made as states struggle to meet their balanced budget requirements.4 The worldwide outlook is slightly better, but the 2003 International Monetary Fund (IMF) predictions show slow economic growth. Estimated worldwide GDP is expected to grow 3.2 percent in 2004, with slower growth expected in the United States (2.6 percent) and Europe (0.5 percent). Developing economies are the bright spot, with GDP estimated to grow at 5.0 percent. While long-range economic outlooks show recovering growth worldwide, there is little evidence that governments in industralized countries are likely to see substantial revenue increases to reverse the funding cuts required during the past two years. Worldwide unemployment rates are expected to continue to remain at high levels through 2004 and worldwide equity markets are still approximately 50% below their early 2000 peak levels. These ongoing fiscal constraints have contributed to a tendency for communities—local, regional and national—to reexamine the traditional practice of democratic societies of automatically funding “the public good.” We will return to the discussion of future funding for public goods, but we begin this section with a review of global education and library spending and a closer look at the traditional sources and uses of libraries funding, both in the U.S. and for selected regions across the globe where data is available. |
