The budget balance recorded a surplus of around 488.7 million dinars (MD) in the first half of 2024, a significant increase compared to the same period last year (26.3 MDT), according to the note entitled “Provisional results of the provisional execution of the State budget” recently published by the Minister of Finance.
This improvement is mainly due to a 13% increase in budget revenues to 23.2 billion dinars, as a result of a 10.3% rise in tax revenues to 20.8 billion dinars and an 11.2% increase in non-tax revenues to 1.8 billion dinars.
At the same time, budget expenditure grew at a slower pace (+8.2%), rising from 20.5 billion dinars at end-June 2023 to 22.2 billion dinars at end-June 2024, mainly due to the increase in subsidy expenditure (+3.6% to 11.2 billion dinars), intervention expenditure (+8% to 5 billion dinars) and financing expenditure (debt interest) (+36% to 3.2 billion dinars).
It should be noted that subsidy expenditure accounts for 50.5% of total budgetary expenditure, while intervention and financing expenditure account for 22.8% and 14.7% respectively.
On the other hand, investment expenditure did not exceed 8% of total government expenditure (i.e. 1.8 billion dinars), while cash resources amounted to almost 7.5 billion dinars and were mainly used for debt repayment.
It should be noted that 63.7% of the external debt contracted by Tunisia in the first six months of the current year was contracted under multilateral cooperation agreements, 22.1% under bilateral cooperation agreements and 14.2% was raised on the financial market. Most of these loans were raised in euros (almost 57%), dollars (28.6%) and yen (7.4%).
