2005 budget draft to be unveiled next month
Urip Hudiono, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Minister of Finance Boediono said on Monday that the current administration would submit to the House of Representatives the draft of the 2005 state budget on May 5 for deliberation.
Boediono said that legislators were expected to start debating the proposed budget once the current recess period ended early next month.
"We'll submit the basic (economic) assumptions for the 2005 budget to the House on May 5," he told reporters, but declined to provide details.
Other ministry officials, however, have previously said that the state budget deficit next year was projected to further decline to 1 percent of gross domestic product (compared to the 2004 estimated deficit of 1.2 percent of GDP), while public debt level is expected to fall to around 60 percent of GDP.
The government has argued that the early deliberation of the 2005 budget is crucial because the upcoming new government (to be formed in November) would not have sufficient time to make the budget that would be effective starting January next year.
More over, the provincial governments need the state budget to be completed two months before it becomes effective to allow them to make adjustment in their budget.
The country's recently elected legislators will start to work in October, while the new president will be sworn in November, followed by the forming of a new cabinet.
Elsewhere, Boediono said that the state budget was projected to reach an equilibrium (a zero percent deficit) in 2006.
"In may opinion an equilibrium can be reached in 2006. But it will all depend on the new government," Boediono said.
Separately, a senior official said on Monday that the government managed to generate during the first three months of this year 23 percent of its targeted revenue for the 2004 state budget.
The current standing would therefore keep the budget on track as the government has set for the whole year a target of Rp 349.9 trillion (US$41 million) in revenue, mostly from taxes.
"Revenue from value added taxes, land and building taxes, and income tax from the oil and gas sector was slightly higher than expected, but revenue from income tax from the non-oil and gas sector was slightly below expectations," head of the Ministry of Finance's fiscal analysis body, Anggito Abimanyu, told reporters.
Anggito, however, declined to reveal the current standing of the budget deficit or how much the government had spent during this year's first quarter.
"Expenditure is still small as many funding disbursements for subsidies and development projects have not started yet," he said briefly.
The government is expecting to spend Rp 374.4 trillion for the 2004 budget year.