Egypt achieves LE 93.1B primary surplus in 2020/21, revenues increases 12%

CAIRO – 29 July 2021: Minister of Finance, Mohamed Maait, confirmed that the government succeeded in improving financial performance indicators during the past fiscal year 2020-2021, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic that negatively affected the largest economies in the world.

Maait said in a statement Thursday that state revenues grew at an annual growth rate of 12.2 percent during the last fiscal year, with an increase of LE 119 billion, and expenditures increased by 9 percent.

He added that the budget witnessed last fiscal year achieving a primary surplus of LE 93.1 billion, representing 1.4 percent of GDP, and reducing the total deficit from 8 percent in 2019/2020 to 7.4 percent in the 2020/2021 fiscal year.

He stressed that the projects of digitizing the tax administration system succeeded in raising the efficiency of tax collection, reducing cases of evasion, and integrating the informal economy into the formal economy, which contributed to the payment of the dues of the state's public treasury, in a way that helped increase tax revenues, during the fiscal year 2020-2021, with an amount of LE 95 billion, a marking a growth rate of 12.8 percent compared to the last fiscal year.

The minister pointed out that the increase in tax revenues came without imposing any additional burdens on citizens, despite the Corona pandemic and its negative effects on many sectors and the decrease in the revenues of some economic activities at rates of up to 50 percent, and then the decrease in the revenues of some types of taxes by rates of up to more than 50 percent.