National budget asset – Newspaper Kommersant No. 231 (7432) dated 12/13/2022

According to the results of 11 months, the federal budget was executed with a surplus of 557 billion rubles, the Ministry of Finance announced yesterday. With revenues of 24.78 trillion rubles. expenses amounted to 24.223 trillion rubles. Separately, in November, the budget also turned out to be in a significant plus – the surplus amounted to 429 billion rubles. Such a favorable outcome of the budget execution is explained by one-off revenues from Gazprom, which is now forced to share with the state part of its excess profits received due to rising gas prices.

Earlier, we recall that (starting from June) the budget balance worsened, for four months in a row it closed with a deficit, due to which the accumulated surplus in January-September shrank to only 55 billion rubles. However, in October the situation changed due to the receipt from Gazprom of the first third of the amount of additional MET (416 billion out of 1.244 trillion rubles; see Kommersant on November 14). The corporation gives this money to the budget instead of paying dividends to shareholders for 2021. The second payment for the same amount was received in November, the third is expected in December. Without this factor, the federal budget for 11 months would have been closed with a deficit of approximately 275 billion rubles.

According to the results of January-November, due to increased prices for energy resources, oil and gas revenues are in a significant plus compared to last year, amounting to 10.655 trillion rubles. (30% more than in January-November 2021). The situation with non-oil and gas revenues (14.125 trillion rubles over 11 months) looks worse: minus 1% compared to the same period last year. At the same time, Gazprom’s money was also involved here: 600 billion rubles were credited to non-oil and gas revenues. corporation’s dividend for the first half of this year.

In December, the situation with the budget balance will change dramatically. The Ministry of Finance recently updated its forecast for the execution of the 2022 budget – despite a surplus of 11 months, at the end of the year, the department expects a deficit of 2% of GDP instead of the previous estimate of 0.9% of GDP, or 1.3 trillion rubles. This means that with the same GDP parameters, the expected size of the “hole” in the budget will be approximately 2.9 trillion rubles. According to Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, “a fairly significant amount of budget spending will be made at the end of the year, including partly on account of next year’s expenses, so this year we estimate a budget deficit of about 2% of GDP.”

Vadim Visloguzov