On March 15, 2019, the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine presented the Report on the State Budget of Ukraine for 2018 for members of the media, experts, and the public.
The report was presented by the Minister of Finance of Ukraine Oksana Markarova. The discussion was also attended by Deputy Chairman of the Budget Committee of the Verkhovna Rada People's Deputy of Ukraine Serhiy Melnyk, Deputy Ministers of Finance Yuriy Dzhyhyr and Vasyl Shkurakov, representatives of the media, and experts.
The presentation of the report was attended by the representatives of the department of the financial policy of the National Institute for Strategic Studies Yuliya Kasperovich and Antonina Deshko.
Presentation of the Report on the State Budget of Ukraine for 2018 is the first public step of the Ministry of Finance before this document gets submitted by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, the President of Ukraine, and the Accounting Chamber, which should take place by 1 April of the current year, in accordance with Article 61 of the Budget Code of Ukraine.
For reference. According to the results of 2018, the State Budget of Ukraine was implemented with the following indicators:
- revenues 928.1 billion UAH. (or 98.0% of the plan), expenditures - 985.9 billion (or 95.3% of the plan);
- excess of the planned budget revenues for corporate income tax (+ 44.8%), personal income tax (+ 22.3%), as a result of the implementation of measures for the deshadowing of the economy and wage growth;
- deficit of the state budget - UAH 59.3 billion, or 1.7% of GDP with the plan of 2.4% of GDP;
- funds were allocated for implementation of measures in the field of national security and defense in the amount of UAH 191.7 billion, or 5.4% of GDP (4.8% of GDP in 2017);
- the growth of capital expenditures of the state budget was fixed to 69.8 billion UAH, which is 1.7 times more than in 2017.
The main challenges and priorities in 2019 will remain:
- preserving macroeconomic stability and efficient implementation of the state budget for 2019;
- full implementation of the three-year budget planning (now the Ministry of Finance is already developing a draft Budget Declaration for 2020-2022 years);
- increase of the efficiency of budget expenditures (this, among other things, also applies to the implementation of expenditure surveys by separate budget programs of the main spending units of the budget to ensure effective monitoring of the interdependence of the implementation of the state policy in certain spheres and corresponding budget expenditures);
- transparency of budgets (continuation of work on disclosure of information on the state budget execution, transparency of work of budget funds managers in reporting on their expenditures and achieved results, etc.).
We remind that preliminary data on implementation of the State Budget of Ukraine for 2018 were already available for review at the end of January - "Financial Week" monitoring for January 23-31, 2019.