A budget oozing overoptimism

Thursday 19th November 2020

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is also the Minister of Finance, has presented Budget 2021, which looks a good story with a happy ending. It has offered something to everyone, and is bound to go down well with those who are to benefit from tax exemptions and other such relief. All 75 budgets presented in the Sri Lankan Parliament have been tales told by Finance Ministers. Most budget proposals, especially the progressive ones, have remained unimplemented, all these years, for want of funds mostly due to failure on the part of successive governments to meet their revenue targets and curtail wasteful expenditure.

As for Budget 2021, proposals to abolish PAYE and the withholding tax and increase the personal income tax threshold will benefit a large number of people. But it will be swings and roundabouts for them if indirect taxes increase, as feared in some quarters. Steps taken to develop local agriculture and industries through tax exemptions, etc., and allocate additional funds for developing public health and education sectors are welcome. The proposed expansion of the university system, however, is a task that the government has to carry out cautiously, taking into consideration the need to ensure their standards. Even the existing universities are experiencing a severe dearth of qualified teachers and facilities. There are some more progressive budget proposals, and they are welcome. One can only hope that there will be enough funds for their implementation.

The devil is in the detail, though. When one reads Budget 2021 carefully, one sees that several crucial issues have not been addressed in a satisfactory manner. The government has made numerous expenditure commitments as regards development and social welfare, but how does it propose to meet the revenue shortfall resulting mainly from tax concessions and a significant decrease in foreign earnings? Borrowings, both foreign and domestic, will not be easy.

The government has undertaken to reduce the budget deficit to 4% of GDP by 2025. This is a very ambitious target. One may recall that it was first set by a UNP-led government, in 2002. The then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe declared, in Parliament, that the budget deficit would be brought down to 4% of GDP by 2008. (His government fell in 2004!) Later on, the Mahinda Rajapaksa government undertook to achieve that target. Now, another Rajapaksa government has repeated the same promise. It seems to believe that the economy will expand at such as rate that its revenue will increase automatically. It is being overoptimistic.

The success of any programme to reduce the budget deficit to the expected level hinges on the government’s ability to increase revenue to at least 10.8% of GDP, in 2021, as economists argue. This goal will be unattainable without new tax proposals. A shortfall in revenue collection may lead to a much higher budget deficit than 8.8% of GDP. Such a situation can be averted only by curtailing public investment, inter alia, to match lower revenue. This means most ministries will not receive allocated funds for the implementation of envisaged projects in such an eventuality.

It will also be an uphill task for the government to fulfil its expenditure commitments while reducing public debt from 90% of GDP to 70% of GDP and ‘minimizing the risk in debt composition caused by sourcing of foreign loans’. How the government is planning to achieve this target is not clear.

As for the envisaged budget deficit, 8.3% of GDP is expected to be financed through domestic borrowings. Enough domestic financial resources in terms of savings will not be available for the government to borrow such a large amount domestically, and the Central Bank may have to print money as it has done this year in view of the pandemic. If money printing continues, it will result in serious problems such as higher inflation and price instability.

The government has expressed serious concern about slow progress in foreign-funded projects and low returns therefrom. Pointing out that the number of programmes implemented annually with foreign financing has increased exponentially, the PM has said in Budget 2021: “However, a significant number of projects worth more than USD 6.000 million show slow progress. The main deficiencies identified in monitoring of project planning, feasibility, implementation are deviation of the projects from national requirements, and frequent cost and time escalations resulting in low returns … Due to these expenditures, productive investments which could have been implemented at a lower cost are not adequately financed …” Has the government forgotten that most of these problems are also due to rampant corruption involving politicians and bureaucrats. How does it propose to tackle corruption, which will put paid to its efforts to keep the costs of development projects low and increase returns?

Meanwhile, Budget 2021 does not reveal how the Treasury is going to meet USD 6 billion worth of foreign currency debt obligations falling due during 2021 while having only USD 5.5 billion official reserves with the Central Bank. If the government fails to raise at least USD 6 billion external borrowings, it will be forced to default on its external debt obligations––absit omen!––and this has never happened in Sri Lanka. If it were to happen, Sri Lanka would have a hard landing currency crisis similar to ones faced by Greece, Argentina and Zimbabwe, in the past.

Overall, we view Budget 2021 as a government attempt to achieve a set of highly ambitious goals within an overoptimistic macroeconomic framework.