Revenue collections exceed target

Business » Economics

The government generated higher-than-expected revenue in October, Fiscal Police Office (FPO) director-general Sathit Limpongpan said on Wednesday.

Mr Sathit said the government's revenue collection in the first month of fiscal 2010 amounted to 111.052 billion baht, higher than target by more than 15 billion baht or 16.2 per cent.

The global economic recovery had bolstered imports and consumption in the country, while the oil excise tax hike since May had significantly increased collections of the Revenue, Customs and Excise Departments.

Increasing imports caused the value-added tax collection to exceed the initial projection by 23.2 per cent and the import duty by 21.1 per cent. Domestic consumption also improved, resulting in the car excise tax collection being higher than target by 58.2 per cent and the consumption-based VAT collection by 7.2 per cent.

However, state enterprises' total revenue collection was down to 1.456 billion baht, or 9.5 per cent lower than expected, because of the government's measures to reduce people's spending.

The FPO chief expressed confidence that the government's revenue collection for fiscal 2010 would be higher than projected.

The Public Debt Management Office reported the government’s outstanding public debt as of the end of September, 2009 stood at 4.001 trillion baht or 45.55 per cent of the gross domestic product.

Chakkrit Parapuntakul, deputy director at the office, said of the total, 2.586 trillion baht were the loans directly acquired by the government, 1.109 trillion baht were debts owed by the non-financial institutional state enterprises.

Another 208.7 billion baht were loans sought by the state enterprises which are financial institutions and guaranteed by the government, and the remaining 98.15 billion baht were loans acquired by the state-owned Financial Institutions Development Fund (FIDF).

The outstanding public debt dropped 16.24 billion baht from August as a result from a 22.85 billion baht decline in the government’s directly acquired loans and the 2.65, 2.84 and 1.13 billion baht increase in loans of the non-financial and financial institutional state enterprises and the FIDF respectively, Mr Chakkrit said.

The Office of Industrial Economics said this year's GDP would likely show a contraction of 3.5 per cent for this year.

Director-general Sutthinee Pupaka said the industrial sector was expected to shrink 5.9 per cent this year.

The recovering global economy and the government's economic stimulus measures had enabled the manufacturing production index (MPI) and the production rate to increase continuously, Mrs Suthinee said.

The MPI turned positive for the first time in 11 months after it rose one per cent in September.

She said there were also positive signals from the textile, automotive electronics industries, she said.

The risk factors were the consistency of global economic recovery, rising fuel prices and domestic political stability, she said.