Gov’t still nurtures balanced budget dream, this time in 2013

The government has moved its balanced budget target to 2013 in line with the recovery of the global economy, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said.

Beltran they are not yet done with the expenditure program for that particular year but the budget is targeted to be balanced on account of improvement of the domestic economy.

The government initially eyed to balance its budget in 2008 but was later moved to 2010 due to the harsh global economic environment.

For this year alone, the inter-agency Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) set the revenues initially at P1.365 trillion while the deficit was at P102 billion, or about 1.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

These figures, however, were revised last April to P1.295 trillion for revenues and P199.2 billion for the deficit at 2.5 percent of GDP on account of the global slowdown.

Last June, these figures were further revised to P1.239 trillion for revenues and P250 billion for deficit due to larger impact of the global economic crunch.

Relatively, Beltran said that despite raising the deficit to P250 billion for this year, they will not attempt to lower this as the government needs to boost spending to ensure the economy’s growth.

For this year, economic managers continue to see the domestic economy growing amid the global recession with the figure pegged between a range of 0.8 to 1.8 percent, down from the initial figures of 3.7 to 4.4 percent then to 3.1 to 4.1 percent.

Beltran said he sees the deficit reaching the ceiling “if the projects will be implemented as programmed.”

“(We) are not looking at going lower than this. We will try to hit P250 (billion),” he added.–Daily Tribune