Vietnam's budget overspending down in 5 months

By：Xinhua Update：2017-06-12

Vietnam's budget overspending in the first five months of this year stood at over 55.5 trillion Vietnamese dong (nearly 2.5 billion U.S. dollars), the Finance Ministry said on Friday.

Vietnam is strictly practicing thrift and combating wastefulness, partly by axing expenditures for unimportant investment projects, meetings, festivals, ground-breaking ceremonies and overseas study tours; limiting car purchases; and reducing numbers of people on the state payroll.

In the first five months of last year, the country faced budget overspending of 70 trillion Vietnamese dong (roughly 3.1 billion U.S. dollars).

Between January and May this year, Vietnam's state budget spending reached nearly 484.6 trillion Vietnamese dong (21.4 billion U.S. dollars), up 22.6 percent year-on-year, and accounting for 45.4 percent of the annualized plan.

Specifically, expenditures for development investment were some 3.4 billion U.S. dollars, debt payment and interest expenses nearly 2 billion U.S. dollars, and regular spending over 16 billion U.S. dollars, said the ministry.