Additional budget 2024/ The government saves 75 million euros from the pension scheme, reallocated to investments

2024-02-23 07:29:51, Ekonomi CNA

Additional budget 2024/ The government saves 75 million euros from the pension

During the week, the government approved the first changes in the budget by adding 10.6 billion lek to the general revenue plan, which will be reallocated to public investments and debt reduction.

The data from the new fiscal table show that from the increase in income by 10.6 billion ALL (7.9 billion ALL comes from the positive financial result of the Social Insurance Institute (ISSH) that administers the public pension scheme and the rest 2, 5 billion ALL are additional income from profit tax).

Sources from the Ministry of Finance clarified that ISSH has accumulated a surplus of 7.9 billion lek from the years 2021 and 2022 and now they have been collected in the budget in a separate item "Financial Result of ISSH."

This result has been helped by the increase in social security collections, while the government has paid to ISS the entire transfer programmed for the years 2021 and 2022.

From April 2022 to April 2023, the national minimum wage increased three times, going from 30,000 ALL to 40,000 ALL, a policy that positively affected insurance income. Salaries also increased at all other levels, both in the private and public sectors, positively affecting budget income from salaries.

In 2023, budget revenues increased by 12.3%, or about 71 billion ALL more. The data shows that individuals are the ones who have had the main impact on the increase of income in the budget, through insurance payments and personal income tax. About ALL 34 billion were collected from these two items, or almost half of the increase in income.

Tax revenues and contributions, for the 12 months of 2023, were realized to the extent of 99.7% with the revised plan increasing with the normative act of the budget, as well as to the extent of 101.3% with the initial plan. On the other hand, the pension scheme has restrained the growth of expenses despite the fact that the number of people in the scheme increases year after year, at least 15 thousand pensioners per year. But most of them, since they do not complete the years of work, benefit from a partial pension. Year after year, the new old-age pensions are reduced due to the anomalies that the labor market has shown during the transition.

On the expenditure side, additional revenues were reallocated almost to public investments. The amount of capital investments with internal financing increased to 87 billion ALL from the 77 billion ALL that were foreseen in the initial budget. More detailed data show that the budget of the Ministry of Infrastructure increases by 4.3 billion ALL or 8%, where 1 billion ALL goes to finance road transport. The funds for maritime transport reach 10 billion ALL from the 8.8 billion that were at the beginning and will go to the construction of a new port in Porto Romano. Another 2 billion lek was added to the budget of the Albanian Development Fund, whose financing reached 18.5 billion lek from the 16.5 billion lek that were in the initial budget./ Monitor.al