THE STATE budget ended last year with a deficit of €4.436 billion. This means it grew by €925 million month-on-month in December and by €1.645 billion when compared to the deficit posted in 2009, the Finance Ministry announced on Monday, January 3, as reported by the TASR newswire.
Nevertheless, the final figures were better than had been forecast in the revised state budget that the Finance Ministry released at the end of November 2010.
That had raised the original deficit forecast of €3.746 billion to as much as €4.54 billion.
State revenues reached €10.901 billion by the end of December, or 91.9 percent of the revised expected revenue (€11.867 billion). They grew by 3.4 percent year-on-year, TASR wrote.
Overall state expenditures grew by 15 percent year-on-year to €15.337 billion, which represented 93.5 percent of the revised plan (€16.407 billion).
Finance Minister Ivan Mikloš explained the need for the revised budget by pointing to the discrepancies between the budget adopted by the previous government and economic reality, saying that the previously planned deficit of 5.5 percent was no longer realistic since the actual figure was approaching 7.8 percent of GDP.
