Tunisia’s outstanding public debt reached 83.5 billion dinars at the end of the first quarter of the current year, compared to 82.5 billion at the end of the past year, i.e. a rise of 1 billion dinars, according to the provisional results of the execution of the State budget at the end of March 2020.
The structure of the outstanding public debt shows a slight decrease in the share of external debt from 72.7% to 71.3% between March 2019 and March 2020, to 59.5 billion dinars.
As for the outstanding domestic debt, it reached nearly 24 billion dinars in the first quarter, representing 28.7% of the country’s total public debt, compared to 27.3% at the end of March 2019.
This debt is 35.8% from the financial market, 48.4% from multilateral cooperation and 15.9% from bilateral cooperation.
By currency, the structure of outstanding debt is still dominated by the euro (55.5%), followed by the dollar (27.7%) and the Japanese yen (11%).
The 2020 budget law provides that the outstanding public debt will reach 94 billion dinars or 75.1% of GDP, against an outstanding of 82.5 billion at the end of 2019 (72.4% of GDP).
The debt service amounted to 2.7 billion dinars (-4.1%) at the end of March 2020, composed of 1.6 billion dinars of principal repayment (-5.3%) and 1.08 billion dinars of interest (-2.4%).
