Military spending and education will remain the key priorities of Lithuania’s 2025 state budget, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė says.
“Basically [next year’s] budget will be very similar to the one this year in the sense that national security and defence as well as education will be the clear priorities,” the prime minister said in an interview with Info TV on Thursday night.
She reiterated that a significant part of next year’s state budget revenues would be used to meet the government’s commitments raise pensions in keeping with inflation, increase teachers’ salaries, and service the public debt.
“A lot of decisions on next year’s budget have already been made in principle. Because these are either certain requirements stipulated by law, for example, to index pensions, [...] or debt servicing costs, which are rising,” Šimonytė said.
Last week, the cabinet allocated almost 32 million euros in additional education spending to increase teachers’ salaries from September and an additional 136 million euros for national defence.
When this year’s state budget was adopted last year, it was expected to raise 16.98 billion euros in revenue and have 20.6 billion euros in expenditure. The spending deficit was estimated at 3 percent of GDP.
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