The 2024 budget was closed without spending 420 million euros

2025-02-26 08:03:00, Ekonomi CNA

Albania, as a developing country and with a high level of relative poverty of over 20 percent of the population, has high needs for financing from public funds, including education, health, infrastructure, wages and pensions, which are the lowest in the EU and the Region.

Despite these needs, the state budget exceeded 420 million euros last year, which were not spent according to the program, according to official data from the Ministry of Finance.

With the latest changes to the normative act for 2024, 771.3 billion lek were planned to be spent, but only 728.5 billion lek were realized, or 42.7 billion lek less than planned.

As can be seen from the data, the largest underperformance came in the current expenditure item with 22.7 billion lek less than the plan and mainly from the plan for salary increases.

The government did not spend 11 billion lek or 110 million euros from the salary increase plan according to the 2024 program.

Another amount of 5.6 billion lek was saved by reducing debt interest, resulting in less than planned allocations from the state treasury for this item last year.

Part of the unspent funds in 2024 is an amount of 11 billion lek (110 million euros) in the form of a pensioner bonus that will be allocated this spring.

The government has also saved about 3.7 billion lek from reserve funds, due to the lack of unexpected events or "surprise" expenses.

Another amount of 16 billion lek was saved by not implementing the revised capital expenditure program. Out of 132 billion lek planned for capital investments in 2024, 115 billion lek was implemented.

The government has not allocated foreign financing from capital investments according to plan. Only 17.4 billion lek were withdrawn from this item, out of the planned 28.8 billion lek.

As a result of the positive performance of revenues and the failure to realize public expenditures according to the program, the government managed to reduce the budget deficit to -18.2 billion lek from -57.2 billion lek, which was the 2024 plan. The budget deficit in 2024 was the lowest in 30 years, since 1994.

Data shows that public spending was highly concentrated in December. More than 20% of the total budget in 2024 was allocated in the last month./ Monitor Magazine