Latvia’s budget for emergencies expanded by EUR 300 million for 2021

According to the order issued by the Latvian government, the state budget programme for emergencies will be expanded by EUR 300 million for this year.
The budget increase is related to the plan for operational response and allocation of necessary funding for the measures ministries in Latvia plan to employ in order to overcome the challenges caused by Covid-19 in their respective sectors and overcome the crisis.
Financing will be provided in accordance to the ministries’ needs.
The budget programme for emergencies received funding of EUR 1 626 729 748 this year. The remaining amount, as of 29 September 2021, is EUR 26 815 052.
The increase of funding will take into account the fact that the Ministry of Finance has received and continues to receive new funding requests in different stages of approval, as well as the funding requests from other ministries in accordance with the recent decisions made by the Cabinet of Ministers.
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The government has ordered the minister of finance to inform Saeima’s Budget and Finance Committee regarding the decision to increase appropriation. If the committee does not raise objections within five work days, the minister is to execute increase of appropriations.
As previously reported, the state budget’s programme for emergencies received EUR 614.29 million in Q2, according to information compiled by the Fiscal Discipline Council.
Initially it was planned to allocate EUR 26.7 million for the budget programme for emergencies this year. However, the Covid-19 crisis forced the government to increase this budget programme several times, increasing the total financing amount to EUR 1.626 billion.