Hungary’s cash flow-based budget deficit, excluding local councils, reached 1,312.6 billion forints (EUR 3.76bn) at the end of May, widening on stimulus measures, the Finance Ministry confirmed in a detailed data.
In May alone, the budget shortfall was 269 billion forints, 55.1 billion forints less than a year before. The central budget deficit was 1,171.0 forints at the end of May. Social insurance funds were 155.0 billion forints in the red, while the separate state funds had a surplus of 13.4 billion forints.
“The development of growing expenditures was influenced mainly by items necessary for re-starting the economy,” the ministry said. “The aim of the government is to get everybody put in a difficult situation because of the pandemic back on their feet,” it added. The ministry said Hungary’s quarter-on-quarter GDP growth of 2% in Q1 shows that “economic defence and economic recovery measures taken so far have worked”.
The ministry noted that lawmakers had approved amendments to the 2021 budget act late in May that raised the deficit target to 7.5% of GDP, based on European Union accounting methodology. The public debt-to-GDP ratio is targeted at 79.9% in 2021, down from 80.4% in 2020.
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