One billion euros not burning a hole in state's pockets

The general consolidated budget posted a 1.02 billion-euro surplus in the half-year, that is 1.12% of GDP, a slight decline from the previous month.
The budgetary surplus is largely generated by the local budgets, which have 478 million euros left unspent on top of the revenues in the first half of the year. At the same time, the pension budget witnessed a 141.5 million-euro surplus, and the health insurance budget posted 169 million euro surplus.
This means the money is available in the state’s accounts but is just sitting there unused because of the lack of projects on which to spend it. The budgetary revenues in the first six months amounted to 14.05 billion euros and total expenses amounted to 13.03 billion euros. The information is included the half-year budgetary statistics published by the Finance Ministry yesterday.
The Government’s full-year goal is to attain a deficit of 2.5% of GDP, that is 2.33 billion euros.
The state will therefore have to unleash public spending in the second half of the year to attain the scheduled deficit target.
In other words, public spending will have to exceed revenues by 3.33 billion euros in the second half, with the state’s failure to spend as much as it collected in the first six months of 2006.
The information published by the Finance Ministry shows that the state spent more on subsidies than on investments in the first part of the year. Subsidy spending amounted to 820 million euros, while capital expenses (investments made by the state with public funds) stood at merely 758 million euros.
The state also spent 2.9 billion euros for the wages of the over 175,000 public servants and almost 450 million euros for interests on various loans in the first half. Another 350 million euros went to loan repayments.
“Most ministries spent one third or only a quarter of their full-year allocations” says Mihai Tanasescu, chairman of the Budget-Finance Committee of the Chamber of Deputies.