The budget deficit after the first ten months of this year is of 74.04 billion lei, respectively 7% of GDP, announced on Thursday, in a press conference, the Minister of Finance, Florin Cîţu.

“The deficit after the first 10 months is of 74.04 billion lei, ie 7% of GDP. Of this amount, 40.74 billion lei, ie 3.88% of GDP, are the amounts that remained in the economy through the fiscal facilities: investments, exceptional expenditures allocated to combat the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Let it be clearer, if we did not have this health crisis in 2020 and we did not have additional expenditures generated by the health crisis, the budget deficit after 10 months would have been about 3% of GDP, which means that we would have been exactly in our initial program,” Cîţu explained, according to Agerpres.

On the expenditure side, compared to the budget increase through the effect of the laws, there was an increase in investment expenditures by 8.7 billion lei compared to the same period of the previous year, as well as exceptional payments generated by the Covid-19 epidemic of about 11.8 billion lei.

The revenues of the general consolidated budget amounted to 263.48 billion lei in the first ten months of 2020, with an advance of 0.9% over the level received in the corresponding period of last year. Expressed as a share in the estimated GDP, budget revenues increased by 0.5 percentage points, mainly due to the dynamics of revenues from European funds, according to data from the Ministry of Finance.

In terms of monthly developments, total revenues accelerated in October (10.3% year/year), mainly due to the advance of revenues from European funds, VAT and insurance contributions.