ANKARA
Turkey's central goverment ran a budget surplus of 1.6 billion Turkish liras ($588 billion) in May, the Finance Ministry reported in a statement on Monday.
The deficit in the first five months of the year was 2.4 billion Turkish lira ($882 billion), the statement said.
“Despite the low levels of growth of the Turkish economy compared with our target, the economy will easily meet our budgetary target of 2015,” Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek said in the statement.
There was a budget surplus of 1.6 billion Turkish lira ($540 million) in April, a deficit of 6.8 billion lira ($2.6 billion) in March and 2.4 billion Turkish lira ( $915 million) in February and a 3.8 billion Turkish lira ($1.54 billion) surplus in January.
According to the ministry, the government's budget revenues have reached 197.9 billion Turkish liras ($73 billion) in the first five months of 2015, an 12.5 percent increase compared with the same period of 2014.
Budget expenditures for the same period rose to 200.4 billion Turkish lira ($73.62 billion), marking a 12.1 percent increase year-on-year.
Government revenue in May was 41.8 billion Turkish liras ($15.4 billion) with an 11.2 percent increase year-on-year, while budget expenditure was 40.1 billion Turkish liras ($14.7 billion), up 11.2 percent from a year earlier.
"We continued to maintain a strong budgetary performance in May,” Simsek said.
Turkey's Finance Ministry has estimated that budget expenses for the 2015 fiscal year will reach 473 billion Turkish liras ($192 billion), while budget income will be 452 billion ($183.5 billion), resulting in a budget deficit of 21 billion Turkish liras ($8.6 billion).
Simsek forecast that Turkey will reach its budget deficit goal in 2015. " The budget deficit in the first five months constituted 11.5 percent of our estimation of the projected 21 billion Turkish lira ($8.6 billion) budget deficit for 2015,” he said.
"We maintained fiscal discipline as always we do. We [the Justice and Development Party] prioritized the medium- and long-term stability of our country in the past five months. We never employed election spending [special spending to attract votes]. We hope it will serve as an example in Turkish political history," Simsek added.
The Turkish central government's budget ran a deficit of 22.7 billion Turkish liras ($10 billion) in 2014.
