State Secretary Bertrand (Open VLD) sees budget deficit reduction of 6 billion euros as a positive development, but believes more efforts are needed.

The government’s budget control does not promise to be as difficult a task as first feared. Traditionally, prior to that audit, the Monitoring Committee publishes its budget report, in which a group of top officials scrutinize our public finances. The calculations point to a deficit in 2023 of 4.8 percent of gross domestic product for all governments – federal, regional and local – combined. In the budget that the federal government had submitted to the European Commission in October, this was still 5.9 percent of GDP.