It is likely that in the next few years a substantial amount of attention and comment will be devoted to the state of the public finances. In his budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Norman Lamont, forecast that the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR) for 1992–3 would be £28 billion or 4 1/2 per cent of GDP. This figure should be contrasted with the government's own policy of balancing the budget over the medium term and the objective set out in the Maastricht Treaty on European Union of avoiding ‘excessive budget deficits’. In this context, a topic of some interest is the likely pace and scale of any improvement in corporation tax receipts as the economy recovers from recession.