The central state budget in 2020 is supposed to have zero surplus, BelTA learned from Belarusian Finance Minister Maksim Yermolovich.
The official said: “The budget will be balanced. It is the least we should do. If we manage to do it, we will try to secure a budget surplus. But making sure the budget is balanced is the task at hand.”
In his words, the budget policy will prioritize further increasing revenues of the population, ensuring social protection, and financing social programs of the government. It is also necessary to restore capital spending of the budget. It is supposed to be accomplished by reducing tax preferences and optimizing volumes of state support granted to enterprises.
“We've been accumulating budget surplus until this year. We also expect the budget surplus to continue growing in 2019. In the future we will more actively spend these leftovers in 2020-2021 in order to beef up capital outlays, budget investments, and keep up living standards of the population,” the finance minister explained.
The draft budget for the year 2020 is supposed to be ready by 1 August.
Asked about the work of the advisory board for fiscal policy under the Finance Ministry, Maksim Yermolovich explained that the advisory board was going to look into the optimization of tax preferences. Increasing the tax burden was out of the question. “We should come up with proposals to prune the least effective tax preferences, replace them with direct budget subsidies where it is necessary. On the whole, it is necessary to make sure budget revenues grow and partially compensate for the losses caused by the so-called tax maneuver in Russia,” he specified.
The surplus of this year's central state budget is supposed to reach Br1.7 billion.
