The Egyptian government has approved the draft budget for the fiscal year 2019-2020. The budget aims at reducing the public debt to 89 percent of GDP, achieving an initial surplus of about 2 percent of GDP and reduce the total deficit to about 7.2 percent.
According to a report issued by the Ministry of Finance on February, the total debt of public and local budget instruments in June 2018 was 97.2 percent of GDP.
Mohamed Maait, the Egyptian Minister of Finance explained "over the next three years, the government is aiming to gradually reduce the public debt to 80 per cent of GDP by the end of June 2022 and achieve an annual sustainable annual surplus of 2 per cent by 2020-2021."
He added: "the current financial situation of the Egyptian economy is better than the previous one according to the international institutions, the investor community and the financial indicators of the state, where we succeeded in increasing the size of the first surplus in the general budget to 21 billion pounds, and increased the tax revenues, resulting in not to request any additional appropriations for the general budget of the current fiscal year ".
Source: (Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, Edited)
