Portugal State Budget 2021 deficit lower than many other EU partners

Portugal’s finance minister, João Leão will present the European Commission with one of the lowest budgets in the EU for 2021 in terms of deficit.

The Government is meeting with the other political parties that make up the Portuguese parliament — the left-wing Bloco Esquerda, the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and PAN (Party for Nature and Animals) after being accused of not going far enough to relieve the financial and economic difficulties faced by the Portuguese people.
The outline document has already been submitted to the EU – on 12 October – and the State Budget shows that the budget deficit for 2021 is one of the lowest in the Euro Zone.
Out of 17 countries, only Latvia (-3.9%), Greece (-3.9%) and Luxembourg (-2.7%) have set lower budget deficits for 2021 in their State Budgets.
Portugal’s budget deficit has been set at -4.3%. It is significantly lower than the deficit of Spain (-7.7%), Ireland (-5.7%) and France (-6.7%) and equal to Germany’s (-4.3%).
Portugal is planning to have a much shorter budgetary stimulus than the majority of European countries in 2021, the others expected to take more advantage of the suspension of rules governing European budgets.
Overall, when weighing up the difference between the 2020 deficit and the deficit of 2021, which can be interpreted as a budgetary adjustment for each country, Portugal sits in the middle of the league table with a reduction of deficit of three percentage points.
In Estonia, the deficit will increase by one percentage point and there are six countries where the deficit will be lower.
The size of this variation depends not just on adjustments, but also on the starting point of 2020. So Portugal’s deficit in percentage terms falls from -7.3% in 2020 to -4.3% in 2021 (-3).
Austria falls from -9.5% to -4.3% (-3.2) for the same period, Belgium -10.3% to -6% (-4.3), Estonia -6.6% to -6.7% (0.1), Finland -7.7% to -5% (-2.7), France -10.2% to -6.7% (-3.5), Germany -6.25 to -4.25 (-2), Greece -8.6% to -3.9% (-4.7), Ireland -6.2% to -5.7% (-0.5), Latvia -7.6% to -3.9% (-3.7), Lithuania -8.8% to -5% (-3.8), Luxembourg (-7.4% to -2.7% (-4.7), Malta -9.4% to -5.9% (-3.5), Holland -7.2% to -5.5% (-1.7), Slovakia -9.7% to -7.5% (2.2), Slovenia -8.6% to -6.6% (-2) and Spain -11.3% to -7.7% (-3.6).