Provided the overall amount of savings on each “mission” is ensured, the individual ministries can choose which spending programmes to downsize, and the Ministry for the Economy and Finance can make further changes during the year acting on a proposal from the ministry concerned. Nearly a third of the expenditure savings will come from local government.
The definition of specific measures is deferred to the revision of the Domestic Stability Pact, scheduled for the end of July. Savings on this count are expected to rise from € billion in 2009 to € billion in 2011.