Africa-Press – Eswatini. The country’s projected total expenditure for the 2022/2023 financial year stands at E23.2 billion.
This reflects a minimal decrease of 3.5 per cent compared to last year’s budget of E24.04 billion, as disclosed by Minister of Finance Neal Rijkenberg during his fourth budget speech delivered yesterday morning in Parliament.
The minister informed parliamentarians that the appropriated recurrent expenditure was set to be E16.2 billion, which showed E1.9 per cent increase when compared to the previous year. He said the total budget allocation for capital programmes was E5.4 billion while revealing that the budget deficit projected for the 2022/2023 financial year was at 4.8 per cent of GDP, which translated to E3.8 billion.
“It is important to note that the total government expenses for the 2021/2021 fiscal year were budgeted at E24.04 billion while the projected expenditure at the end of the year is E21.5 billion due to lower than anticipated drawdown on capital programmes.
This is approximately 30.1 per cent of GDP and the total projected expenditure for 2021/22 is about 3.9 percentage points lower than the outturn in 2020/21. “Mr Speaker, the deficit for financial year 2021/22 was budgeted at 6.5 per cent of GDP which is higher than the 4.9 per cent deficit to GDP ratio for financial year 2020/21.
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This equates to an increase of E1.3 billion to E4.6 billion. While we have been able to fund part of this through local borrowing, a large part of it will be financed through external borrowing for budget support,” the minister said. Rijkenberg also announced that government’s revenue excluding grants in the 2022/2023 fiscal year was expected to reach E18.7 billion, which was 23.8 per cent of GDP.
This shows two per cent decrease compared to the 2021/2022 financial year.
Giving a more positive financial outlook for the economy, the minister said total income taxes were anticipated to increase by close to 0.6 per cent from an estimate of E6.3 billion in 2021/2022 to about E6.9 billion in the current financial year.
“This is because of higher expected growth and employment in 2022/23 compared to 2021/22. Out of this, corporate income taxes are expected to grow from E1.8 billion the previous year to E2.1 billion in 2022/23. Similarly, personal income taxes are expected to grow by 10.5 percent to E4.3 billion,” he said.
In addition, the minister also mentioned that taxes on goods and services excluding SACU receipts were expected to decrease by 5.3 per cent to E5.5 billion. Further, the finance minister said fuel tax was expected to decrease by 6.7 per cent, which amounted to E1.4 billion. Levy on imported motor vehicles is expected to decline from E20 million to 12.9 million (at around 35.5 percent).
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