Page 56 - bne IntelliNews Russia Country report May 2017

6.3 Budget outlook
The Ministry of Finance submitted draft amendments to the 2017-19 federal budget on its legal disclosure site and painted a rosier picture.
Total revenues were revised up RUB1.1tn to RUB14.6tn, while expenditures grew RUB0.3tn, to RUB16.6tn. The estimate of nominal GDP for 2017 has also been marked up to RUB92.2tn, 6.2% above the figure in the current budget law.
The published amendments suggest that the deficit is to narrow in a more front loaded manner , with the deficit for 2017 at 2.1% (instead of 3.2% in the current version of the budget).
The bulk of the increase of 8.5% in expected revenues is apparently attributable to oil & gas revenues . The most recent federal budget execution data shows that non-oil & gas revenues remain consistent with typical seasonality and the current budget. On the other hand, the federal budget collected 39.1% of the planned oil & gas revenues in the first four months.
Oil and gas revenues are projected to beat the initial forecast by 0.5% of GDP, or RUB460bn according to a MinFin note which has not been included in the published document bundle.
Vedomosti notes that the non-oil & gas revenues have been adjusted downwards by the amount of the expected shortfall in the privatisation proceeds (-RUB96.1bn), but the assumption on the dividend income remains intact (RUB483bn).
The revision does not affect the scale of the local net debt issuance programme, which remains at RUB1.0tn.
The revisions are likely to be neutral for the monetary policy outlook. The
56 RUSSIA Country Report May 2017 www.intellinews.com