The Egyptian cabinet said on Wednesday it had approved the proposed state budget for the fiscal year 2019 - 2020. Egypt's fiscal years start on July 1 ends June 30 of the following year.
An official statement quoted Finance Minister Mohamed Maeit saying that the new budget aims to reduce the public debt to 89 percent of the GDP and achieving an initial surplus of about 2 percent of the GDP and reducing the total deficit to about 7.2 percent of the GDP.
"Over the next three years, the government aims to gradually reduce the rate of public debt percentage of the GDP to 80 by the end of June 2022 and to achieve a sustainable annual surplus of 2 percent of the GDP until 2021-2020," Maeit said.
For her part, Minister of Planning, Follow-up, and Administrative Reform Hala al-Saeed said that the sustainable development plan for 2019-2020 aims at achieving an economic growth rate of 6 percent. Saeed added that the plan aims to increase total investments to LE1.17 trillion.
Fitch Ratings had expected earlier that Egypt’s external debt service would average around $10 billion or 12 percent of current external receipts in 2019-2020 in line with the current 'B' peer median.
Egypt's GDP growth reached 5.4 percent in the first half of 2018-2019, rising from 5.2 percent in the same period of the previous year.
