Mubarak reviews Egypt's draft budget of 2002/2003

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met yesterday with a ministerial economic group to discuss Egypt's draft budget of 2002/2003 whose total sums hit L.E. 141.4 billion, the biggest throughout Egypt's modern history.

Following the meeting held, Minister of Information Safwat Al-Sherif said that the most important features of the budget which was presented by Prime Minister Atef Ebeid and Minister of Finance Medhat Hassanein were represented in public expenditure, development of resources and the various sources of funding and the volume of this year's general budget.

Al-Sharif said that President Mubarak gave several directives, which included:

First: There should be priorities as follows: to provide the social needs of citizens (education, health, subsidy, services for youth, contribution to the umbrella of social insurance and pensions).

Second: To provide the necessary funding to provide employment for youth.

Third: To maintain the rates of increase in wages and salaries to employees within the framework of an overall administrative reform plan.

Fourth: To continue carrying out infrastructure projects- drinking water, sanitary drainage and roads - and to build schools, hospitals and health units and to give priority to rural areas and Upper Egypt.

Fifth: To give priority to carrying out electricity projects, whether in cities or in rural areas, and projects in the new urban communities and to upgrade public utilities, foremost among which are railways.

Sixth : To be committed to allocations, not to exceed them and to adhere to financial discipline and to rationalize spending under the financial supervision of financial auditors at the Ministry of Finance before and after payment.

Seventh: To carry out stages of giant projects within appropriations allocated in the budget and in accordance with a funding plan distributed over the financial year.

Eighth: To carry out studies to execute an overall plan to reschedule government's debts and to deal with structural imbalances in the budgets of some economic organizations with the aim of realizing economic balance.

Al-Sherif added that allocations of public spending in this budget, which totals L.E. 141.4 billion, have been made to meet the following basic needs:

First: L.E. 56 billion to provide the social needs education, health, subsidy, youth services, sports, cultural services, social and religious services - in addition to providing job opportunities for about 100,000 young people.

This amount represents about 40 percent of the expenditure in the projects of the budget.

Second: L.E. 34.8 billion for wages and salaries of employees. This includes social and annual allowances in addition to giving employees annual and incentive increases due to them and to activate programmes to employ youth.

Third: L.E. 18.9 billion to carry out projects of the infrastructure - drinking water, sanitary drainage, roads, schools and building hospitals and health units - in addition to basic giant projects such as the projects of the South Valley, the development of Sinai and setting up an economic zone north of the Gulf of Suez and other major development project

Fourth: L.E. 4.5 billion to manage work in the government apparatus including administrative expenses, fuel, maintenance and rent and all that concerns the administration of the state in its agencies. This sum represents 3.2 percent of the total budget.

The Minister of Finance pointed out that this percentage is less than the percentage in last year's budget.