The Tunisian Ministry of Finance revealed that the budget deficit has increased by 56 percent during the first half of the current year, as the size of this deficit reached about 3.847 billion Tunisian dinars (about 1.4 billion dollars), compared to 2.453 billion dollars during the same period last year.
The Ministry attributed this increase, at the level of the budget deficit, to the increase in government expenditures as a result of recording an increase of 14 percent at the level of the wage block, which represented one of the points of disagreement with the International Monetary Fund, which called for reducing it from 14 to 12 percent of GDP.
The value of debt repayment due to the Tunisian government also increased by 40%. During the first half of this year, as a result of the economic recession and the suspension of various activities for months in a row due to the Corona pandemic, the self-resources have shrunk by 12 percent, which has affected various financial balances.
Government borrowing resources increased by 33 percent to approximately 7.1 billion dinars (2.6 billion dollars) at the end of last June, distributed between 3.9 billion dinars of external loans and 3.2 billion of internal loans, and the size of these loans did not exceed the limits of 5.3 billion dinars (1.9 billion dollars) by the end of the first half of 2019.
As a result of the government's reliance on borrowing policy, the value of the domestic debt service increased by 41%, while the external debt service, in turn, increased by 16%. As a result, the Tunisian public debt increased to 89.4 billion dinars (about 36 billion dollars), compared to 83.1 billion dinars at the end of the first half of 2019.
Source (Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Edited)
