Al-Sudani’s advisor settles the controversy over stopping employees’ salaries at the beginning of 2025
Al-Sudani’s advisor settles the controversy over stopping employees’ salaries at the beginning of 2025
2024-12-15
Mazhar Muhammad Salih, the economic advisor to the Prime Minister, commented Saturday (December 14, 2024), on the possibility of the government’s inability to pay employees’ salaries after the first quarter of next year.
Saleh said in a press interview, “The Iraqi financial policy has a flexible pattern of its standards called (fiscal space), which means maintaining the government’s ability to increase spending or even reduce some taxes or modify the areas of the undefined tax bases to reach its taxpayers to support the economy without causing serious financial problems such as inflation or a large deficit.”
He added that “this space is currently available in our country as long as the financial situation is still good, and it allows the government to adopt financial policies to stimulate economic growth, such as increasing spending on infrastructure or improving social services, with some internal borrowing when needed and at a rate that still revolves around 3% of the GDP without affecting the concept of financial consolidation, which means reducing the annual deficit and reducing the balance of outstanding debts and making them within limits that do not deviate from the internationally accepted standard rate for annual financial and monetary stability, which is 60% of the country’s GDP.”
He pointed out that “the total value of internal debts and the little remaining external debts, their balance has now not exceeded 30% of the country’s gross domestic product (i.e. annual national income), which indicates that there is a high level of stability in the general price level and in cash flows as resources for the general budget, some of which can even be secured when needed from internal borrowing, without stumbling blocks or any pessimistic outlook.”
He explained that “what is being achieved above does not indicate that there is a deterioration in oil prices as long as the OPEC+ group’s policy has become its function to absorb the surplus quantities in the oil market by reducing members’ quotas to raise prices in leaps, and it is a policy that must be reflected in a stable manner in the position of the federal general budget for the year 2025 in its average annual revenues and expenditures, so with caution and caution, but financial concerns are coming.”
Some political figures had expected in press statements that employees’ salaries would stop in the fourth month of 2025.
burathanews.com
