Reversing this decline is one of the many fiscal challenges we face. The increase in central government expenditure in terms of GDP has been relatively moderate. The bulk of the increase has, however, been on current rather than on capital expenditure of the kind that increases productive capacity. In general, there are real questions about the quality and allocative efficiency of government expenditure.
In the last two years, Government has begun to sharply increase its expenditure on education and health. You could also infer from the table that the high energy tax collections are masking an underlying imbalance as reflected in an increasing non-oil fiscal deficit. This deficit has risen from 6.5 to 10.7 of GDP.