Budget remains in sanction zone

Slovakia has still not emerged from the sanction zones of the debt brake. This was confirmed by the latest Eurostat data, which definitively modified and increased the Slovak deficit and debt for last year. According to Eurostat, the deficit of the general government budget reached 1.06% of GDP last year, compared to the 0.7% of GDP initially reported, and compared to the spring notification, the statistics authority increased public debt by 0.5 percentage points to 49.4% of GDP after taking into account additional factors. Eurostat already announced in the spring notification that it would investigate some items that will potentially increase the deficit and debt for 2018 by several tenths of a percentage point. Slovakia's debt level was also increased by the recent benchmark revision of gross domestic product data, which showed that Slovakia did not get out of the sanction zones of the debt brake even last year.