MOSCOW, May 21 (RIA Novosti) – Russia must reduce the share of oil and gas state revenues and gradually cut oil prices, which could provide for a balanced budget, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Wednesday.
The Russian Finance Ministry has called for decreasing the non-energy budget deficit, or deficit which excludes revenues from its key oil and gas exports, to 5 percent of GDP from the current 10 percent of GDP.
“We need to step by step decrease the oil price which would ensure a balanced budget. We need to increase non-oil and gas revenues and decrease the share of oil and gas revenues, in other words reduce the non-oil and gas deficit,” Siluanov told a government meeting.
Last year, the Russian budget balanced at a cost of $114 per barrel of oil, with prices averaging around $108 per barrel. “Therefore, we cannot further hold this cost of equilibrium,” the minister said.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday he plans to hold a government session to discuss the dependence of the Russian economy on oil and gas revenues. “We have agreed to discuss the issue of how our oil and gas revenues and non-oil and gas revenues correlate and to what extent this correlation has a key meaning for the economic development.”
