Bahrain will inject $470 million as emergency expenditures to the state budget 2020, state-owned Bahrain News Agency (BNA) reported a royal decree.
The decree-law stipulates that the emergency expenditure will be added to this year’s budget to deal with expenditures incurred as a result of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
Another decree stated that about $450 million will be taken as a one-time deduction from the Future Generations Fund (FGF), a fund set up in 2006 to reinvest hydrocarbon revenues, and allocated to this year's state budget.
The decrees also announced a temporary halt to the allocation of oil revenues to the Fund until the end of 2020.
Last week, BNA cited a quarterly economic report from the Ministry of Finance and National Economy announcing that gross domestic product (dgp) in Bahrain contracted 1.1 percent during the first quarter on an annual basis.
“The global impact of COVID-19 affected Bahrain’s overall economic performance in Q1, causing a decline in real GDP growth (at constant prices) at a rate of 1.1 percent YoY, while the rate of decline reached 4.9 percent at current prices,” reported BNA.
The finance ministry report showed that the economic performance witnessed growth at the beginning of the year before being hit in March by COVID-19, which affected the overall performance of the economy in the first quarter.
The report indicated the oil sector grew at an annual rate of 1.8 percent at constant prices, and the 11.5 percent current decline in prices, while the non-oil sector was driven by the repercussions of the virus, registering a 1.7-percent decline at constant prices and four percent at current prices.
