Balanced budget

Argentine trains ground to a halt and hospitals were left running on fumes this week as austerity measures sparked mass walkouts - even as the country boasted its first budget surplus in 12 years.

During a parliamentary budget committee meeting, Dimitar Radev, the Governor of the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), advocated for a strategic fiscal approach, proposing a 10% buffer allocation within the budget for 2024. This buffer, if not utilized due to unforeseen risks, would be available for expenditure in the final quarter of the year.

The government aims to achieve a more balanced, inclusive and sustainable high growth level, Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek has said, also vowing to reinstate fiscal discipline.

This coming winter, the government will have less leeway to intervene to fix problems such as soaring prices because of more rigid budget surplus obligations.

Ljubljana- In the second wave of epidemic, the government seems to be taking rapid measures under pressure to be able to boast, believes Davorin Kračun, the head of the Fiscal Council. “It could easily happen that many measures will prove counterproductive,” he said in an interview the newspaper Večer runs on Saturday.

The government is considering ad hoc solutions to tackle the major issue of retroactive claims by millions of pensioners and civil servants.

This year's state budget is fragile and unbalanced, since it relies on commitment appropriations which are actually chimeras and mean rolling over payments from one year to another, Florin Jianu, president of Romania's National Council of Small and Medium-sized Private Enterprises (CNIPMMR) told a press conference.

The official data on the execution of the 2018 budget show a higher deficit and a lower primary surplus compared to the targets the government had set.

The government submitted Greece's 2019 budget - the first in the post bailout era - to Parliament on Wednesday, saying it seeks to redress injustices against weaker social strata.

Moreover, Alternate Finance Minister Giorgos Houliarakis told lawmakers that it does not include legislated pension cuts planned for January.

Greece's central government exceeded its target and achieved a primary budget surplus of 6.46 billion euros (5.63 billion pounds) in the 10 months to October, thanks to higher revenues and lower spending, finance ministry data showed on Wednesday.