House committee submits 25 recommendations to gov’t

AMMAN — The Lower House on Monday embarked on deliberating the 2022 draft state budget and the 2022 draft budgets of independent public institutions.

During the session, chaired by speaker Abdulkarim Dughmi and attended by Cabinet members, MPs agreed to organise discussions through registering the names of those willing to speak, where each lawmaker was granted 10 minutes and every bloc was granted 15 minutes, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.

Deputies Nidal Hiari, Ghazi Sarhan, Mohammed Fayez and Fayzah Odeibat spoke in the session.

The lawmakers criticised the government's economic policies and "recipes" of the International Monetary Fund that led to increasing the public debt and rates of poverty and unemployment, in addition to the deteriorating of the purchasing power of the Jordanian dinar, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, reported.

They called for increasing the salaries of employees and retirees, attracting investments, reconsidering energy and telecommunication agreements, investing natural resources and establishing a development region for the Badia, in addition to improving the level of services offered to citizens across the Kingdom. 

The House also listened to the report of its Finance Committee, where the report showed that the projected 2.7 per cent growth in the budget will be affected by several factors, mainly increasing the allocations of some sectors and granting incentives, in addition to the state of uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The report stressed the need to reconsider the exemptions granted for investments and connecting them to employing Jordanians in light of the unprecedented hikes in unemployment rates by creating a national database on poverty and identifying underprivileged households to provide them with assistance. 

The report also included 25 recommendations for the government, the most important of which are related to increasing the salaries of employees and retirees whose monthly salaries are less than JD300, adopting policies to develop the performance of the transport, agriculture, tourism and energy sectors, reduce water losses, and remove investment obstacles. 

Other recommendations included establishing major projects in partnership with the private sector, collecting overdue money to the Treasury, completing comprehensive and fair health insurance and reviewing agreements on generating electricity. 

Under the draft general budget for the fiscal year 2022, public expenditure is estimated at JD10.0668 billion (including JD1.55 billion for capital expenditure) and the public revenues at JD8.9 billion (68 per cent from taxes, 10 per cent from grants and 22 per cent from non-tax revenues) with a projected deficit of JD1.7 billion.

The budget expects the growth to stand at 2.7 per cent by the year-end and inflation at 2.5 per cent, in addition to an increase of foreign grants to JD848 million, where it seeks to increase the percentage of local revenues to cover current expenditures by 88.5 per cent. 

The estimated revenues of government units stands at JD860 million, JD100 million lower than 2021, while their expenditures stand at some JD1.5 billion with a deficit of JD723 million.

Consequently, the total deficit in the state budget and budget of government units stands at around JD2.4 billion. 

The total public debt is envisioned to stand at JD38.8 billion or 114.7 per cent of the GDP, which will be down to JD30.8 billion or 91 per cent of the GDP upon excluding the debts of the Social Security Corporation.