2024 budget, promulgated
President Klaus Iohannis promulgated the State Budget Law and the State Social Security Budget Law for the year 2024.
Corina Cristea, 29.12.2023, 14:00
Approved on December 15 by the government and, five days later, by Parliament through an accelerated procedure, the State Budget Law and the State Social Security Budget Law for 2024 were promulgated on Thursday by President Klaus Iohannis. Inflation and maintaining macroeconomic balances are the main challenges of 2024, said the Prime Minister, in the plenum of Parliament, when he presented the draft state budget for 2024, built, according to Marcel Ciolacu, in such a way as to ensure the increase in citizens well-being. The strategic targets on which this budget is based are, according to the prime minister, a coherent economic strategy to achieve in 2024 the second highest economic growth in the European Union, record investments, increased incomes for 12 million Romanians, including pensioners, a stronger economic environment by accessing aid schemes for development and the creation of new jobs.
But, at the same time, in order to have a fair, truly competitive economic environment, with fewer exemptions and tax facilities, the government needs a coherent plan for distributing budget expenditures and a package of measures to increase collection and effectively combat tax evasion, along with a firm guarantee for the security of citizens in the context of the war in Ukraine, by allocating a budget of 2.5% of the GDP for defense. It is a carefully gauged budget, to mitigate inflationary pressures, Marcel Ciolacu claims. ‘Just like in 2023, we will have an economy that will grow on investments, not on consumption, and for this we decided to prioritize investments, which will generate half of the economic growth and will have a growth rate double the consumption rate’, the prime minister explained, given that in the matrix of next years budget construction, investments have a special place, amounting to about 7% of the Gross Domestic Product.
And in order to stop throwing money on tens of thousands of projects started and never completed, over 150 important investment projects were selected for 2024, of which 108 for the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure, 21 for the Ministry of Development, 13 for the Environment Ministry and 9 for the Health Ministry. Besides infrastructure, the other two strategic areas in which massive investments will be made in 2024 will be Education and Health. Economic growth is expected to be 3.4%, while the budget deficit is estimated at 5% of the GDP. The opposition, however, criticized the budget construction. Unrealistic, built on false figures, without any vision, the budget bill does not ensure the development of Romania, say the representatives of the opposition parties. According to their calculations, following the overestimation of revenues and the underestimation of expenses, the budget deficit will exceed 7% of the GDP, consequently, there will be no fiscal consolidation, on the contrary. (LS)
