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State Budget Ended Year With Deficit Reaching €2.791 billion
Monday 04 January 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, January 4 (TASR) - The state budget saw out the year with a public-finance deficit of €2.791 billion, the Finance Ministry reported on Monday.
The state did better than was predicted in the revised budget of October 2009, which counted on a deficit of €3.154 billion.
In comparison, 2008 ended with a deficit of €704 million, which means that state financial management deteriorated by €2.087 billion year-on-year.
The state budget for 2009 initially counted on a deficit of €1.009 billion, but with a considerable loss of incomes caused by the economic crisis the Finance Ministry prepared a revised budget that included a deficit more than three-times higher than the one previously expected. It was approved by Parliament in October.
According to the ministry's information, state incomes reached €10.541 billion in 2009, which represented 96.08 percent of the revised expected amount of €10.971 billion and only 80.37 percent of previously-scheduled incomes calculated at €13.116 billion. State expenditures equalling €13.332 billion reached 94.39 percent of the whole-year plan - €14.125 billion.
The global economic and financial crisis caused the Slovak economy to shrink by around 6 percent, meaning that the public-finance deficit should reach 6.3 percent of the country's GDP instead of the previously-predicted 2.1 percent.
The Government promised an overall consolidation of public finances in 2010. The deficit should fall to 5.5 percent of GDP in 2010 and to 4.2 percent in 2011 according to a plan approved in November. Slovakia should again meet the Growth and Stability Pact, which requires public-finance deficit of no more than 3 percent, in 2012. Finance Minister Jan Pociatek believes that this plan is ambitious enough to be approved by the European Commission, which requires Slovakia to comply with the required threshold by 2013.
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