| The government understands the terms The ideology of a surplus budget seems to be finally crumbling. The budget will henceforth be deficit-free or, as they also say, “balanced”, when expenses equal income. At one time, Mikhail Kasyanov began to object to a surplus budget, because he did not understand why plan to additionally withdraw money from the economy in excess of the planned needs of the state, but now Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov is against this.
However, Mr. Zhukov does not object to a budget surplus (that is, the excess of budget revenues over expenses), he only insists that this surplus should not be included in the budget initially.
As Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin explained yesterday, the surplus will now be transferred entirely to the stabilization fund. The minister even coined a special term “technical surplus” for this occasion. That is, “it seems to be there, but it is as if it is not there.”
For four years now, the country has been living with a budget whose revenues exceed expenses. However, as soon as relatively calm years in terms of debt began to appear ahead (the surplus was directed precisely to the payment of external debts), and oil prices jumped to indecent levels, it was decided to preserve the “surplus” of budget money in the stabilization fund. Starting this year, his accounts will receive additional budget revenues arising from oil prices exceeding $20 per barrel. The Stabilization Fund, moreover, is designed to tie up the excess money supply that threatens to accelerate inflation.
It is planned that revenues and expenses of the 2005 budget will be balanced at an oil price of $20 per barrel. And all additional income received as a result of exceeding this price will immediately be credited to the stabilization fund, the minister said. These incomes are now called “technical surplus”.
According to analysts, the abandonment of the planned surplus should not affect plans to reduce the tax burden. According to Troika-Dialog Investment Company economist Anton Struchenevsky, “if the budget plans expenses, including for tax reform, then at the same time it is planned how the budget will cover them.” Therefore, until macro forecasts for the next year are presented (and this will happen only in May), until the parameters of expenses and income are known, it is impossible to even approximately estimate what the volume of either a “technical” or “direct” surplus will be. - says the economist. “Any speculation about whether this certain amount of surplus will allow us to finance losses from reducing the tax burden is premature,” says Mr. Struchenevsky.
Ilya Trunin from the Institute for the Economy in Transition agrees with him. According to him, as of today, even the general parameters of the budget have not been named; it has not been calculated how much its revenues will grow and whether expenses will increase. At the same time, he considers it not at all obvious that the planned tax reforms, in particular the reduction of the unified social tax, will necessarily lead to a “loss” of income. If oil prices remain high, then losses from the unified social tax may well be covered by taxation of the oil industry, he says.
So this time the dispute between Messrs. Kudrin and Zhukov is more like a game of terms. Irina Sklyarova |
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