Spending, by consumers, investors, or the government. Consumer expenditure is restricted to purchasing real goods and services; acquiring assets or making transfers to others by individuals does not count as expenditure. Government expenditure is treated differently: some government expenditure is on real goods and services, but government interest payments and transfer payments to individuals, such as pensions, are counted as government expenditure, and government spending is not clearly divided between current and capital account items, possibly because these are hard to distinguish. National expenditure is what a country spends. See also capital expenditure; consumer expenditure; cuts in expenditure; government expenditure; tax expenditure.