“In its report, the Bank of Latvia makes it very clear that Latvia’s economy is maintained by the government’s spending,” said Director General of Latvian Employers’ Confederation (LDDK) Kaspars Gorkšs in his interview to Artuss Kaimiņš’s programme “Suņu būda V2.0”, adding that tax revenue in this year’s budget were larger than last years. This, according to him, indicates there is no problem in the revenue section. The problem is how this revenue is distributed.
Kaspars Gorkšs said: “Reducing spending is the key factor so that we can implement both the priorities we have set and the reforms we would like, much more ambitious than before.”
Touching on the topic of the state budget, the head of LDDK said the budget composition procedure can be described with several major expressions. According to him, the first is that it is a “security budget”, although each minister has reinforced it slightly, creating a background that we have a crisis budget. The second section is a change in the tax regulation, and the third is “the introduction of a result-oriented budget system in Latvia, which means that the budget is reviewed not only from the point of view of priorities, but also from the point of view of the results achieved.”
Kaspars Gorkšs emphasizes that two important things that permeate the current political situation are the demographic issues and the level of confidence of the population in the government, which is in the penultimate position of Latvia among the OECD countries and behind us is only Colombia.
According to him, trust in public administration is related to the quality offered by the public sector, as well as the quality and timely preparation of various documents.
“We have to say that one of the main sides of the current government are poor-made and hastily directed strategic documents, regulatory enactments, which we cannot fulfil, because they are already rushed,” said Kaspars Gorkšs in his interview.
When asked for some examples, he mentions the grey economy mitigation plan, the development of which is delayed by one year, as well as the human capital strategy, which is delayed by two years.
The Director General of LDDK emphasizes that the government is expected to set an example for the people of its country with its works. “Let the statesmen be those whom I, as a citizen, can follow. And if we talk about austerity measures, that applies to them first and foremost.”
There is also an intrigue in the programme – is Kaspars Gorkšs planning to go into politics, and if so, which political force could he join? The find the answer to this question, as well as the discussion as to what needs to be done with the overblown official apparatus, why good and right initiatives often get stuck in commissions or working groups, about football and many other interesting topics, watch the show.
The entire interview is available here: