Instead, they promote medium and long-term growth prospects and are in Germany’s best interests. Against this background, I think the results achieved by the Mediation Committee at the end of December have to be assessed in a differentiated manner.
For the current year it is now likely that the general government deficit will be somewhat smaller than what the government had led us to believe at the beginning of the inter-House mediation hearing. The main reason for this is that only part of the third stage of the tax reform will be brought forward to 2004.