Although economic objectives ultimately played a secondary role in the financial policies followed by eighteenth-century states, those policies included elements that, wittingly and unwittingly, affected economic trends. If it is generally appropriate to assume that, within certain limits, government expenditures financed by voluntary lending have a greater expansionary effect than those financed by taxation, then it would appear that mercantilist expedient programs tended until the 1790s to enhance economic activity wherever employed throughout Europe. Those programs should therefore be linked with other stimuli in explaining the growth discernible in much of Europe. That states that combined foreign borrowing with paper currency issues were able, until the 1790s, both to enlarge revenues and to increase economic activity is suggested by the expansion of tax revenues in constant values ahead of tax reforms. In Austria and Russia, for example, paper currency issues appear until about 1790 to have filled lacunae between the previous money supply and the supply that could be supported by existing levels of economic activity or higher levels made possible by a larger supply. Where interest-bearing loans were the principal technique of credit inflation, the link between money supply and economic expansion is more imprecise. But there too credit took the place of taxation. Because, however, loans were not spent directly to enhance production for export markets, the assist toward monetary stability and economic growth given by capital imports tended, despite interim expansion of production encouraged by borrowing, to diminish as service payments surpassed new credits.