... cost-cutting in the health sector remained.10Finally, expenditure on interest payments increased by 5.2 percent in 1998, which was solely due to the increase in public debt, since the average interest ... presented in the previous s ec tions were derived under certain assumptions regarding the projected population, the interest rate and the growth rate. In order to test for the robustness of the findings ... publicliabilities. Since immigrants typically are of working age at the time of their entry into the country, they enlarge the group of net tax payers and thus reduce the inter-temporal fiscal53 In Bonin (2001),...