YEREVAN, June 30. /ARKA/. The Armenian government approved today its mid-term spending program for 2023-2025 and a revised plan of actions to reduce the state debt in 2022-2026.
Finance Minister Tigran Khachatryan said the government’s fiscal policy will be aimed at ensuring 7% economic growth in 2023 and the following two years, substantially increasing the share of state investments and improving the efficiency of expenditures.
The minister said that the government debt to GDP ratio will reduce faster than planned and will not exceed 60%, down from the planned 60.2%.
‘Tax revenues will exceed 23.4% of GDP, which is the set goal for this year,” he said. Khachatryan underlined that the state budget expenditures will be financed mostly by own revenues, less will be borrowed, which means that the budget deficit against the GDP will not exceed 3%.
He said the better than expected economic activity in the first 5 months of this year, which amounted to 10.2%, suggest that the projected 7% growth for 2022 will be achieved.
“In 2023-2025, the overall level of state budget spending will be within 28% of GDP. Two circumstances are important here. The first is that budget revenues will continue to increase. Instead of planned 23.4% of GDP in 2022, they will be raised by 1.4% to 24.8% in 2025, approaching the 25% target set in the government’s program,” he said.
Khachatryan noted that the second important significant change is that the amount of borrowed funds will be gradually reduced. According to him, the state budget deficit will be reduced to 3% of GDP and by the end of 2025 it will be within 2.5-2.7% of GDP.
“Correspondingly, the debt of the government to GDP ratio will decrease and in the last year of the program it will be at the level of 55-56%,” he stressed.
‘In addition, capital expenditures from 4.5% of GDP will increase by about 1.5% to 6% in 2025,’ he said.-0-
