Social spending is largest percentage of Kazakh budget in first half 2019

NUR-SULTAN – Spending on social programmes accounted for the largest part of Kazakhstan’s government spending from January to April.

Photo credit: total-croatia-news.com.

Social assistance spending accounted for 27.6 percent of Kazakhstan’s $9.98 billion state expenditures during that period.

Total government spending increased 16.7 percent for that time period year-on-year with spending on social assistance increasing 20 percent to 1.1 trillion tenge (US$2.88 billion). In the same period in 2018, social spending totaled 875 billion tenge (US$2.3 billion).

Social sector spending has been increasing on average 15.6 percent per year for the last five years. Total government spending over that same period has been increasing an average of 12.3 percent per year.

The state guarantees 39 types of social assistance. In 2018, 3.8 million Kazakhs, which is 20.9 percent of the population, received more than 2.5 trillion tenge (US$6.57 billion) in pensions and allowances. In addition to this, approximately 800,000 people received 190 billion tenge (US$499.17 million) payments from the system of compulsory social insurance.

The Kazakh government allocated the second biggest bulk of state budget expenses for January to April to the education sector at 17.6 percent or nearly 671 billion tenge (US$1.76 billion), which is 16.2 percent more than the same time in 2018.

Expenditures on the healthcare sector for January to April increased 12.3 percent to 488.9 billion tenge (US$1.28 billion), 12.8 percent of the total.

The top five list of state budget expenditures from January to April also includes debt service and general public services, which are 252 billion tenge (US$662.05 million) and 225.1 billion tenge (US$591.38 million), respectively.


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