0 a reduction in spending by consumers, businesses, governments, etc., usually because they have financial problems:
1 involving a reduction in spending:
The government has recommended a series of belt-tightening reforms.
Over the past twenty years, Germany and Italy have taken belt-tightening measures that have helped improve their economies.
While inflation points to increasing pension changes based on economic downturns, the strong influence of the unemployment rate highlights the necessity of budgetary belt-tightening.
Across the board it is a picture of continual belt-tightening and of a very difficult time for research scientists.
Thus, it requires at this time on this issue a practical demonstration of belt-tightening.
The private sector continues to suffer from belt-tightening and that trend looks set to continue.
It rightly regards these not as belt-tightening, which may be justifiable, but as potentially damaging to its present fabric and its future success.
It follows that in any belt-tightening exercise, larger farms must suffer disproportionately, and the proposals mirror that.
We may all have to take some individual belt-tightening.
No matter how good the present housekeeping and belt-tightening in the defence field may be, they will not satisfy the critics.
