Croatia's Finance Minister Slavko Linic has said that both budget spending and budget revenue are under control and for the time being that there is no need for planning a new budget revision.
As for a rise in the budget spending and consequently in its deficit from 1 January to 15 April 2013, the minister said at a news briefing on Tuesday that those trends were the result of agreements with the agriculture and the economy ministries to step up the pace of paying subsidies to farmers and to the shipbuilding industry.
From January to mid-April, revenues that poured in the budget totalled HRK 29.5 billion, or 0.3% less than in the same period of 2012, while expenditure went up by 4.8% to HRK 37.9 billion.
As a result, the budget gap totalled HRK 8.4 billion as against HRK 6.5 billion in the comparable period of 2012, according to figures presented by Minister Linic.
Linic did not expect an additional rise in spending throughout the rest of the year, as a portion of the budget expenditures had been carried out in the first quarter of this year. Furthermore, the ministry expects a rise in revenues.
For instance, budget revenues in January totalled eight billion kuna, and in April they came to nine billion which is why Minister Linic is satisfied with the budget revenues collection.
The budget deficit is planned at 10.2 billion, or some 3% of GDP for 2013.
"The cabinet of Prime Minister Zoran Milanovic is showing that it is controlling the deficit and is trying to cap it at 10 billion kuna," Linic said.
He said that this was still a huge gap, but insisted that this was a success as this government would thus manage to reduce the budget deficit from 20 billion kuna in 2011 to 10 billion kuna in 2013, which his ministry believes would be the figure arrived at according to Eurostat calculation methods,
Former Prime Minister Jadranka Kosor and Martina Dalic who used to be the finance minister in her cabinet later on Tuesday accused Linic of trying to divert the public attention from the current problems in the budget with his claim that the previous government had probably made a budget deficit of 20 billion kuna in 2011.
Dalic found it unacceptable for the minister to resort to different statistical methods and calculations only to delude the public.
She recalled that Linic had recently told the parliament that the budget gap in 2011 was HRK 14 billion.
