The 2016 national budget bill is built on an ESA deficit of 2.95 percent; it includes a 10-percent rise in the public pay as well as all the other pieces of legislation in force and it will be submitted to Parliament for final approval around December 10, Finance Minister Anca Dragu said Thursday.
“At the meeting of the Government yesterday [Wednesday] we set the spending caps for the main public employers. The ministries will finalise the annexes to the budget, after which we will put it up for a public discussion, followed by approval and submission to Parliament. We hope all this will happen by December 10. In total terms, the caps are more or less the same [as announced by the former government]. As far as spending is concerned, we introduced the 10-percent rise in public pay. The budget so far includes on the spending side virtually all the pieces of legislation in force, while on the revenue side the revenue is more or less similar,” added Dragu.
She said the 2016 budget is predicated on an ESA deficit of 2.95 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), below a 3-percent level according to the Maastricht criteria. More…