Social and Financial “Classes” to Divide Algerians Starting From Beginning of 2018!

Expert of the World Bank, Mohamed Hamaddouche, has ruled out the possibility for Algerians to continue pursuing the socialist system, until after the year 2018, given the negative impact of certain main indicators on the state budget, including free education, free health care and support for religious rituals such as the annual Hajj or Pilgrimage, in addition to determining the average uniform level of the Algerians’ income.

 In a statement to “Echorouk” on Wednesday, Mr. Hammadouche, underlined that this expected untoward socio-economic juncture would spawn three distinct layers among the Algerian society within the next two years, including the rich, the poor and middle-classes, thus creating a yawning divide in terms of revenues among these three segments of the Algerian population.

He further dubbed the current solutions that seem to appeal to the Ministry of Finance as part of the 2017 Finance law, as “rash and easy”, at a time when the Government must consider first and foremost roofing the proportion of the scathing deficit in the state budget, which is the greatest danger threatening the viability of the coffers of the Algerian state, adding that this endeavor won’t be achieved only through a retrieved balance between expenditures and incomes.

Our interlocutor also recommended slashing the additional costs instead of resorting each time to double the amount of the fees and taxes, notably by hiking the price of fuel and other staple commodities as recently decided by the government in its strenuous effort to curtail the enormous deficit stemming from the sharp drop in world oil prices.

The expert also pointed to the imperious need of fostering a tax initiative horizontally and vertically, while determining beforehand the list of those wealthy Algerian citizens at the national level in order to set up a fair and equitable tax system which won’t be burden on the vulnerable sections of the population.

Mr Hamaddouche explained in this line that foreign countries such as France, for example, requires its citizens to register their own assets every 30 April of each year, for all adults aged 18 years, while in the USA, every citizen is compelled to duly declare his or her assets exhaustively every month of July to the tax office.