The government’s budget deficit narrowed by 0.38 percent to P1.506 trillion in 2024 from a year ago, as revenue collections outpaced the growth in expenditures, the Bureau of the Treasury said Thursday.
“The slight variance versus the P1.484-trillion deficit program was primarily due to a higher outturn in government spending including those charged to unprogrammed appropriation, as well as defrayment of accounts payables,” the BTr said in a statement.
It said that as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP), the deficit improved to 5.70 percent in 2024 from 6.22 percent in 2023.
The government’s total revenue collections reached P4.419 trillion last year, exceeding the target of P4.270 trillion. This was equivalent to 16.72 percent of GDP, the highest revenue effort in the last 27 years, since 1997.
This was driven by better-than-expected non-tax revenue collections. National government revenue collections in December also grew by 20.99 percent to P314.7 billion on account of the higher non-tax outturn.
The BTr said that in terms of composition, tax revenues accounted for 86.01 percent or P3.801 trillion, while non-tax sources comprised the remaining 13.99 percent or P618.3 billion.
The Bureau of Internal Revenue’s (BIR) collections rose 13.29 percent to P2.852 trillion in 2024 from P2.517 trillion in 2023.
Total Bureau of Customs (BOC) collections reached P916.7 billion, or 3.79 percent higher year-on-year, after netting out P5.4 billion in tax refunds.
The increase was attributed to the growth across duties, VAT and excise collections, which is among the effects of the bureau’s strengthened digitization, inspection and border protection efforts implemented during the year.
Non-tax revenues for the year surged to P618.3 billion, growing by 56.61 percent and exceeding the revised full-year target of P449.6 billion by 37.53 percent.
The better-than-expected outturn was primarily due to strengthened efforts to generate windfall collections such as that from the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) concession fee (P30 billion) and the P167.2 billion fund balance transfers from the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PHIC) and Philippine Deposit Insurance Corp. (PDIC).
Full-year disbursements reached P5.925 trillion, or 11.04 percent higher than the comparable level in 2023 and were 2.97 percent above the revised 2024 program of P5.754 trillion.
Meanwhile, government expenditures of P644.2 billion in December were 2.55 percent slower than last year’s P661.0 billion.