Egypt’s gross public debt up by 13.1 pct of GDP in FY 2022-23: finance minister

By Xinhua

CAIRO, Aug. 10 (Xinhua) — Egypt’s Finance Minister Mohamed Maait said on Thursday the country’s gross public debt, the financial liabilities of the government sector, climbed by 13.1 percent to reach 95.6 percent of the GDP in the fiscal year 2022-2023 that ended in June. In a statement, Maait attributed the rise to “fluctuation in the currency exchange rate and decline of the local currency against the U.S. dollars.” “The government targets taking the gross debt down to 80 percent of the GDP in the next four years,” Maait was quoted as saying in the statement. It added that despite international unfavorable conditions that have driven up the prices of most strategic commodities due to supply chain disruptions that resulted in a severe shortage of production materials and an increase in fuel costs, financial performance indicators for the fiscal year 2022-2023 were positive. “We succeeded in decreasing the budget deficit to 6 percent from 6.1 percent in the FY 2021-2022,” Maait said. The initial surplus increased to 1.63 percent from 1.3 percent in the previous fiscal year, he added, noting that the results could have been better without the recent change of currency rate and its inflationary effects. Egypt’s annual inflation rate rose to an all-time high of 38.2 percent in July, up from 14.6 percent in the same month a year earlier and set a national record for the second month in a row, the country’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) announced earlier in the day. The state treasury faced challenges of securing basic commodities when costs were hiking globally, Maait added. Enditem