Jakarta. Indonesia’s 2022 budget has recorded a deficit of 2.38 percent of the gross domestic product against the projected 4.5 percent, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said on Tuesday.

The deficit amounts to Rp 464.3 trillion ($29.7 billion), representing a significant decline from the minus Rp 775.1 trillion in the 2021 budget.

"It’s a very significant decline of 40.1 percent when compared to the budget a year earlier, demonstrating our extraordinary consolidating measures,” Sri Mulyani told a news conference in Jakarta.

“Moreover, during the early stage of the [Covid-19] pandemic in 2020, we suffered a ballooning deficit of close to Rp 950 trillion," she added.

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Overall state revenue jumped by 30.6 percent year-on-year to Rp 2,626 trillion ($168 billion), including Rp 2,034 trillion in tax, excise, and import duty revenues. 

State spending totaled Rp 3,090.8 trillion in 2022, an increase of 10.9 percent from the figures the previous year.

Sri Mulyani said the country’s fiscal condition has greatly recovered from the suffering in 2020 when the deficit topped 6 percent of the GDP.

“The 2022 budget was initially designed to suffer a deficit of 4.85 percent before being revised down to 4.5 percent under a presidential decree. In reality, we managed to keep it even smaller,” she said.