Ben Khalfa: “Funds that were retrieved from the informal market will be the oil revenues’ alternative”

Decline of the oil’s price, which came down to less than the reference price that was adopted in the Finance Act 2016, and that was fixed with $45 per barrel, will not lead to the imposition of new austerity measures, Finance Minister, Abderrahmane Ben Khalfa, said in a statement to Echorouk.

Benkhalfa addressed the citizens and said; “You should be assured that we will not resort to austerity, but you should avoiding wasting.

“Government found a solution and we can provide the necessary resources for the budget through the collection of taxation and funds of informal trade which we retrieved, reliance time has ended up on the barrel of oil.”

“We know that the price of oil dropped, and this is nothing new, even though it is less than the reference price, as the government has the solution and the alternative. We set out some time ago in the recovery of that funds that are outside the banks and the informal sector. The latter became the first financier of the national economy, and their income is even larger than the one that comes from oil, so you should do not be afraid.”

“Energy Minister is following every small and big details on the oil price changes, and its collapse for one day or two is not a disaster. We calculate its average price each month and every four months, and the situation is not dangerous up till now. State calculated things well and Algeria will not depend on oil as from the beginning of the year 2016, because oil is not more than a source of income and did not represent the basic product for the Algerians.”

“There are other resources that mean a lot to us including the tax collection that we seek to expand on a large scale without raising the size of fees, but by lifting the number of people who pay them, and we will not put pressure on the merchants, because things will proceed in an orderly and tightly manner that depends on the expansion of the fiscal rule and not on raising taxes for the citizens.”

“We continue to retrieve the funds in the informal scale and they would compensate oil revenues, and after a few years we will not need oil, and will only become merely a source like many other sources of income by the year 2019.”

“Foreign trade contributes to raising the rate of Treasury Revenues during the next phase”.