Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 30
By Rashid Shirinov – Trend:
For the first 9 months of 2018, Kazakhstan’s state budget expenditures in all directions amounted to 8.1 trillion tenge, which is 13.2 percent less than in the same period of 2017.
The main areas of budget expenditures for January-September 2018 were social assistance and social security (25 percent, over 2 trillion tenge), education (17.4 percent, over 1.4 trillion tenge), and health (10.1 percent, 820.4 billion tenge).
The Top-5 expenditure areas also included transport and logistics sector, public order. In general, the five areas took two-thirds of Kazakhstan’s budget expenditures in January-September.
The largest increase in expenditures was in debt servicing — 36.8 percent year-on-year, up to 483.2 billion tenge.
It is worth noting that since July 2018, economic risks on the public debt of Kazakhstan have been estimated differently. Domestic government loans were excluded from the debt indicator calculations, which reduced the ratio of external loans to the funds in the Kazakhstan National Fund, but had no effect on the country's monetary obligations to foreign creditors.
This formally distanced the dangerous mark, which the volume of external debt approached in late 2017, and nominally increased the permissible ‘band’. This made it possible to continue to take foreign loans without serious financial instability risks.
---
Follow the author on Twitter: @ShirinovRashid