EU finance ministers on Tuesday decided to go ahead with the suspension of a portion of Hungary's cohesion funding for 2013 but also agreed to revisit the decision in June to assess the government's progress in keeping to its budget deficit goals, officials of the EU Danish presidency told MTI.
In line with preliminary data, Hungarian GDP grew by 1.4 percent in Q4 2011 compared to the corresponding period of the year before – the Hungarian Statistical Office has reported today. The detailed report also suggests that economic growth in Hungary has been significantly higher than the EU average and thus the country has continued closing the gap with the rest of Europe. The year-on-year expansion was 1.7 percent.
The 2012 data of the central subsystem of the state budget
The government has been and will be committed to achieving the deficit target. The proof of this commitment is that this is the first government since Hungary’s EU accession in 2004 which cut the budget deficit to below 3 percent.
Hungary is committed to keeping its budget deficit below 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the level set by the European Union, Zoltan Csefalvay, state secretary at the economic ministry, told a committee of European Parliament on Wednesday.
The government has decided in summer 2010 after it had reviewed the system of domestic burden sharing, learned the opinions of stakeholders of the economy as well as surveyed the international experiences and trends in taxation to radically transform the system of personal income taxes and gradually implement the flat-rate personal income tax in Hungary. In regard to the aforementioned transformation several objectives have been identified which included the simplification of the system of personal income taxation, the creation of balanced and proportionate social burden sharing, the reduction of tax burdens and the increase of the number of taxpayers.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has published on its home page their regular annual report on Hungary. According to Article 4 of its charter, the IMF shall prepare a review of every member country at least once a year.
The government is ready to discuss any comment or proposal with the European Commission in regard to the Excessive Deficit Procedure verdict.
The Ministry for National Economy hereby confirms that the accrual-based deficit target figure based on EU accounting methodology will come in as expected at below 2.94 percent of GDP.
Report on the measures taken in response to Council recommendation of 7 July 2009 under Article 126(7) of the Treaty