Lithuania’s budget may be balanced in 2017 at earliest

Rimantas Šadžius
DELFI / Tomas Vinickas

“I’m actually looking into 2015 with cautious optimism and expect us to reach the targets. However, if I am asked whether I am satisfied with this budget as the finance minister, I’d say that probably not entirely since we expected better results from the convergence program in terms of budget or public finance deficit. We expected 0.9 percent, whereas now our estimations show 1.2 percent [of GDP]. And that balancing of the budget, which we expected to do in 2016, will probably occur later, in 2017. We have to be realistic,” he told the LRT TV on Monday night.

In line with the 2015 draft budget, the country’s fiscal deficit will reach some 1.2 percent of gross domestic product while the central government deficit will increase by 23.2 percent from this year to approximately 342.4 million euros.

Previously the authorities expected a public finance surplus of 0.1 percent of GDP in 2016.

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