Minister of Finance says that deficit of 2.5% is “good news” – the Journal News

The minister of Finance, Mário Centeno, welcomed this Friday with the deficit, which stood at 2.5% of GDP until September, whereas “good news”, which enables you to ensure that the country will exit the excessive deficit procedure.

“It’s a good news for the Portuguese economy”, stressed the governor, in a statement to reporters, after the disclosure by the National Institute of Statistics (INE) of the budget deficit of the general government, which stood at 3.405,6 million euros until September, or 2.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Mário Centeno said that the data guarantee the fulfilment of the commitments for the country to exit the excessive deficit procedure, highlighting that with this growth in the “healthy and sustainable, it falls off so more a myth about the fiscal policy of this Government.”

he Left also a message to the doubters of budget execution, alleging that there was “an impossibility mathematics achievement of targets”, criticizing those who did not make “his work” and was limited “to recite numbers, pre-built without adherence to reality”.

according To the quarterly accounts by institutional sector, published today by the INE, in national accounts, the optics that counts for Brussels, in the first three quarters of 2016, “the overall balance of general government stood at -3.405,6 million euros, representing a marginal 2.5% of GDP, a value that compares with a deficit of 3.4% in the same period last year.

THE INE explains that this improvement of the balance was determined by an increase in total revenue at 0.8%, but also by a decrease in spending of 1.1%.

on The revenue side, highlights the increase of 5.6% taxes on production and imports and 3.6% of the social contributions. In spending, the decline of the capital expense in accounting for 32.7%, which represented 1.7% of GDP (2.7% of GDP in the same period of the previous year), verifying a decrease of 28.4% on the investment.

According to the statistics office, the financing capacity of the economy was 0.9% of GDP in the year ended in the third quarter, 0.1 percentage point higher than the one observed in the previous quarter.