The Department of Finance (DOF) said Tuesday the government remains on track to meeting its 2024 fiscal targets on robust revenue generation and manageable deficit in the first half.
“So far, we are on track to meet our fiscal program for the year, having already achieved half of our targets,” Finance Secretary Ralph Recto said during the 2025 national budget deliberations at the Senate.
He said that as of mid-year, total revenues grew 15.6 percent to P2.15 trillion. Tax collections from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and the Bureau of Customs (BOC) totaled P1.84 trillion, or 10 percent higher than in 2023.
Recto credited this through digitalization, strict enforcement and plugging of leakages in the tax system—especially from e-commerce.
Meanwhile, non-tax revenues recorded a 63.3 percent growth, totaling P314.2 billion as the Department of Finance (DOF) hiked government-owned and -controlled corporations’ (GOCCs) dividend rates to 75 percent from 50 percent.
“This robust revenue performance placed us among Asia’s top revenue-to-GDP ratios at 17.1 percent for the first half of the year. And this is above our full-year target of 16.1 percent,” Recto said.
Expenditures also grew 14.6 percent in the same period, reaching P2.76 trillion. In the first semester of 2024, expenditure-to-GDP stood at 21.9 percent in the first half of the year.
The fiscal deficit remained manageable at P613.9 billion as of end-June 2024. As a percentage of GDP, the deficit stood at 4.9 percent in the first semester, below the full-year target of 5.6 percent, he said.
Over the medium term, the government expects revenues to grow by an average of 10.3 percent annually. Revenues as a percentage of GDP will also increase from 16.1 percent in 2024 to 17 percent in 2028.
Recto asked the BIR and BOC to work doubly hard and boost efficiency as tax collections are expected to rise by 11.8 percent annually, outpacing the roughly 8.7-percent average increase of nominal GDP from 2024 to 2028.
This will be driven by projected double-digit collection growths of both agencies. By 2028, the tax effort is seen rising to 16.3 percent from 14.4 percent in 2024.
“These projections took into account the additional revenues from the refined revenue reforms of the DOF, which we recalibrated to ensure that they do not place undue burdens on the taxpayers,” Recto said.
Disbursements are expected to grow by an average of 7.4 percent and remain at about 21.1 percent of the GDP.
“With higher government revenue collections and improved expenditure management, our fiscal deficit is projected to drop from 5.6 percent in 2024 to 3.7 percent by 2028,” Recto said.
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