The government’s Budget for 2015 is to be presented to Parliament on 24 October, according to reliable sources.

The government’s attention has been focused on the possibilities of holding a Presidential election in January 2015 and there are possibilities the 2015 Budget being presented to Parliament earlier than usual this year, said Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella in response to a question by adaderanabiz.lk during a recent media briefing.

He said since the Appropriation Bill for 2015 had been presented earlier than in other years the Budget too would be similarly presented earlier.

He added that this was also since the government is looking at possibilities of holding a Presidential election in January 2015, but this has still not been confirmed.

The Appropriation Bill with the estimated revenue and expenditure of the government for 2015 was presented to Parliament on 26 September by Prime Minister D.M. Jayaratne.

According to the Bill the funds for government expenditure for next year has been increased by 17 percent compared to 2014.

While expressing his views, Deputy Secretary of the Finance Ministry S.R. Attygala told adaderanabiz.lk that the 2015 Appropriation Bill has allocated Rs. 3,053 billion for expenditure and the funds allocated through the 2014 Appropriation Bill for expenditure was Rs. 2,599 billion.

Accordingly, the expenditure for 2015 is set to increase by around Rs. 450 billion.

Apart from this, going further than the target of maintaining a budget deficit of 5.2 percent for 2014, it has been planned to reduce the budget deficit to 4.4 percent and increase the economic growth rate to 8.2 percent during next year.

Sri Lanka was able to reach a 7.8 economic growth during the second quarter of this year while the overall expected economic growth for this year is 7.8 percent.

In 2015, government investment it expected to be increased to 6.5 percent of the GDP and maintain inflation at 5.5 percent.

As a percentage of the GDP the current government debts which is around 75 percent is expected to be reduced to 71 percent.