Ruling parliamentary parties on Thursday gave the thumbs up for a report on the execution of the state budget for the first half of the year. The opposition Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) opposed the report with accusations that the Finance Ministry was not presenting the real state of the budget and that it would probably have to revise the budget.
Deputy Finance Minister Boris Lalovac started off by stating that macro-economic indicators were poor but the government hoped that the second half of the year would "show signs of recovery".
Lalovac reported that total budget revenue in the first semester grew by 3.5 percent compared to the same period last year and amounted to 53 bln kuna which is 48.7 percent of the year's plan.
Tax revenues were 4.1 percent higher than last year, with a six percent increase on revenue collected through Value Added Tax.
Budget expenditure amounted to 58.9 bln kuna, which is 49.5 percent of the annual plan.
Total budget deficit is 5.8 bln kuna or 1.7 percent of the GDP which is 0.9 percentage points lower than for the same period last year, Lalovac explained.
He stressed that the government was intensively working on stabilising revenues in order to keep on top of the deficit which before the year's end is forecasted will be 9.9 bln kuna.
Former HDZ finance minister Ivan Suker said that in the first year of the crisis, 2008, the budget deficit was 0.6 percent, to which Lalovac responded that Suker should not omit to mention that in the three years after that the HDZ government accumulated more than 40 bln kuna in deficits.
