public finance

The Lithuanian government has agreed to extend a €420 million interest-free loan to Lithuania's social insurance fund, the Sodra, to help it "balance cash flows".

A growing number of Lithuanians are investing in state securities that finance state borrowings, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of finance.

The city of Kaunas and its municipal companies have have cut their debts by €45 million over the last nine months.

Lithuania will not introduce progressive taxation because there are too few high-earners, according to the country's social democrat Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius.

Increased efforts to tackle tax evasion and the black market led to a significant increase in tax revenues for the Lithuanian government in 2015, according to Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius.

The Lithuanian parliament, with the blessing of President Dalia Grybauskaitė, approved a generous government budget for the year 2016 but views of whether such a budget is prudent are mixed.

Lithuania's draft budget for 2016 allows for conservative optimism, says Loreta Graužinienė, speaker of the Seimas. According to the parliament's leader, there is no risk that budget spending would exceed income in 2016 more than projected.

The European Commission published its assessment of budgetary plans submitted to it by eurozone countries. Commenting on Lithuania's 2016 national budget draft, the EC says it strays too much from fiscal discipline targets and that Lithuania might fail to keep structural deficit below 1 percent of G...

The National Audit Office criticised Lithuania's national budget for 2016, saying it was based on excessively optimistic tax collection expectations. Minister of Finance Rimantas Šadžius has dismissed the remarks.

The Lithuanian government is planning to increase the budget for the State Security Department (VSD) by 500,000 euro. However, parliamentarians say that in view of the growing geopolitical threats, the VSD should receive a far bigger budget increase.

The Seimas, the Parliament of Lithuania, has accepted for consideration the 2016 state draft budget law after discussions and questions to Finance Minister Rimantas Šadžius.

After the Finance Ministry has submitted proposal for the 2016 state budget, which envisages a slightly bigger fiscal deficit than this year, the National Audit Office says this raises the risk for long-term sustainability of government finance. President Dalia Grybauskaitė warns that Lithuania migh...

The gap between revenue and expenditure of Lithuania's State Social Insurance Fund, the Sodra, next year is expected to narrow by around 48 percent to 95.494 million euros, according to its draft 2016 budget.

Liberal Remigijus Šimašius, who has been serving as the mayor of Vilnius for 100 days, says that he managed to reduce the city's debt by 2.4 percent or EUR 8.6 million in the period from late April to early July.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė said on Monday that Greece would not leave the eurozone, but if it did, this would have no negative impact on the Lithuanian economy.

Greece wants to feast and to have other countries pay its bills, Lithuania’s president has said, adding that Lithuania has a tough stance towards the Greek debt crisis in particular as the country does not want, in the president's words, to take responsibility for several decades of living beyond it...

Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Commission's vice-president for the euro and social dialogue, has warned that Lithuania's budget deficit should not increase this year, noting that the EU's executive body forecasts that the country's budget deficit in 2015 will be 0.7-0.8 percentage points above the...

Lithuanian Finance Minister vilniusRimantas Šadžius does not support the idea of allowing local governments to issue bonds, saying that such bonds would create an additional risk to fiscal sustainability.

Remigijus Šimašius, Mayor of Lithuania's capital Vilnius, says that real financial changes will be visible in Vilnius after 2016. He intends to invoke foreign financial institutions to manage the city's debts.

In 2014, Lithuania posted the smallest budget deficit among member-states of the European Union (EU), barr countries that reported surplus, the EU's statistics office Eurostat said.