2 billion euros or 1/4 of the budget is spent in December

2024-12-26 07:35:21, Ekonomi CNA

The government has available to spend in December an amount of 196 billion lek (about 2 billion euros at the current exchange rate), which is 25 percent of the total budget of 2024.

According to the recent changes in the normative act, budget expenditures remain unchanged at the level of 771.3 billion ALL (7.7 billion euros), while 575 billion ALL had been spent until November. According to the current program, a quarter of the 2024 annual budget program remains to be spent in December.

Free liquidity in the 2024 budget as a result of expenses lower than income reached about 720 million euros (71.7 billion ALL in November 2024). When the parliament voted on this year's budget, it was planned that the budget deficit in November would be -19.9 billion ALL or about -200 million euros.

The government has not only not consumed the new debt, but on the other hand, it has not managed to spend the realized income according to the program. With this liquidity, the government is in a good financial situation, which enables it to achieve a historic reduction in the debt level. But in the last changes made to the 2024 budget through the third normative act, the government left unchanged the target of the deficit with -57 billion ALL and of general budget expenditures, accumulating for allocation in December about 1 quarter of the budget of this year.

2 billion euros or 1/4 of the budget is spent in December

General public expenditures, for the 11-month period of 2024, reached about ALL 575.3 billion with a realization of 88.1% of the plan for the period.

In annual terms, the general expenses for the 11th month of 2024 were realized to the extent of 78% of the annual plan according to the initial budget and 74.6% of the annual plan according to Normative Act no. 3 date 28.08.2024.

Daily payments from the treasury during these days are about 8 times above the monthly average of 11 months. The concentration of budget expenditures has become routine in recent years, where almost 1 third of the budget is concentrated in the last two months of the year.

A detailed table with the progress of annual investments in 2024 shows that the weakest allocation in capital investments is in education, where at the end of the year not even a third of the funds have been spent at the pre-university level. Since this part of the investments is the responsibility of the local government, they fail to be realized according to the program, leaving the schools in miserable conditions.

Also, investments in the local government have performed very poorly. Last year only half of the program was implemented and this year progress is very poor.

The inability to spend on time is creating liquidity surpluses in government accounts. The High State Control in an inspection at the Ministry of Finance said that the concentration of expenses at the end of the year indicates a lack of effectiveness in the use of taxes. The High State Control has verified that almost 20 percent of the 2023 budget has been allocated in the first two months of 2024./ Monitor.al