RIGA, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- Latvia will have its largest budget ever next year, Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins announced on public television Wednesday.
With the Baltic country's economy showing sustained growth, its budget is expected to expand by 500 million euros in 2020, Karins said, noting that the government will therefore be able to provide over 10 million euros in additional funding for wages and investment.
The prime minister said that next year, Latvia will have a record-large budget, exceeding 10 billion euros. Although growth has been slowing in recent months, the inflow of budget revenue remains strong, he said.
This year, Latvia's budget expenditure is expected to reach 9.391 billion euros as compared with 8.95 billion euros in 2018 and 8.36 billion euros in 2017, according to data from the Finance Ministry.
Karins said he would prefer to save up some financial reserve in the budget, but as prime minister, he is obliged to coordinate various legitimate interests of the five political parties united in his center-right coalition government. The 2020 budget, therefore, will still have a small deficit, the premier added.
Karins also stressed the need to ease the tax burden on Latvia's lowest-paid population. The prime minister believes that this can be achieved by raising nontaxable minimum income and not the minimum wage as suggested by the New Conservative Party.
Work on the 2020 government budget was also the focus of Wednesday's meeting between Karins and President Egils Levits who concluded that so far the prime minister has been coping with the coordination of the budget drafting process quite successfully.
After the meeting with the president, Karins said that his intention is to strengthen social justice with the new budget. "I believe that as a government, we will manage to do it," he added.
