Serbia registered an unusually high general state surplus of RSD 16.6 billion in January, and the Fiscal Council says that the achieved result is in line with the planned fiscal framework for this year.
The January surplus is mostly a result of a one-off increase in non-tax revenues due to payment of Telekom dividends totalling RSD 7.6 billion, the Council said in an analysis.
In fact, the 2015 budget envisions significantly higher non-tax revenues.
In addition, successful fiscal consolidation measures (the reduction of pensions and public sector salaries since the end of last year) resulted in cost cuts that totalled around RSD 6 billion, as planned in the budget.
Positive fiscal results in January have become customary in recent years as a result of seasonally low public expenditure performance.
If the effects of one-off factors (payment of Telekom dividends) and policy changes (salary and pension cuts at the end of 2014) were to be excluded, the surplus in the first month of 2015 would total around RSD 3 billion, which would be fully comparable to January results in past years, the Fiscal Council said.
The general state debt amounted to nearly EUR 23.7 billion – or 75.2 percent of GDP – at the end of January, growing by around EUR 450 million since the beginning of the year.
The strong January growth of public debt is almost exclusively a result of an approximately 7-percent rise of the dollar against the euro.
Preliminary figures indicate that Serbia’s public debt reached EUR 23.9 billion at the end of February.
A high general state deficit of RSD 257.5 billion – or 6.6 percent of GDP – was registered in 2014, with RSD 187.5 billion as the deficit of authorities at national and other levels, while the remaining RSD 70 billion were below-the-line expenditures (repayment of activated guarantees on loans to public and state enterprises and interventions in the financial sector).
The deficit is around RSD 30 billion lower compared to the 2014 budget plan even though public revenues were down by around 30 billion, because total state expenditures were cut by twice as much – around RSD 60 billion.
State revenues were lower than planned due to unfavourable macroeconomic trends and overly optimistic planning, in particular as regards VAT and excise revenues.
The lower-than-planned state expenditure performance is mostly a result of poor implementation of public investments – approximately RSD 36 billion “cost cuts” – an excessively wide framework for employee expenditure and postponing the completion of the process of restructuring companies until 2015.
As a result, around RSD 16 billion set aside as redundancy pay for people who lose their jobs was unspent in 2014, with the expenditure carried over to 2015, said the analysis of the Fiscal Council.
Source;Â SerbGov
