Advice in Preparation of the Stability Programme 2024-2027.
The original version of the March 2024 Advice of the Section ‘Public Sector Borrowing Requirement’ has been published in Dutch (here) and in French (here). Below, you will find the English translation of the Advice.
This Advice falls within the assignment given to the Section by the Cooperation Agreement concluded on 13 December 2013 between the Federal Government, the Communities, the Regions and the Community Commissions, after its approval by their respective Parliaments, regarding the implementation of Article 3 of the Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union. The Treaty was signed by Belgium on 2 March 2012 and entered into force on 1 January 2013.
This Advice contains normative budgetary paths for the period 2025‑2027.
The annual recurring assignment of the Section is part of the preparation of the Stability Programme 2024-2027 to be handed over by the federal government to the European Commission by 30 April 2024 at the latest, in application of the regulations of the current European budgetary framework, and this despite the imminent final adoption and entry into force of the reform of the European legal framework for economic governance in the European Union. Pursuant to that reform, the stability and convergence programmes will in the future be replaced by national medium-term fiscal-structural plans. These medium-term plans will have to be drawn up by the Member States of the Union for the first time in the course of the second semester of 2024, starting from the reference trajectory that will be established by the European Commission for each Member State.
For this reason, the present Advice has been limited to a mere update of the budgetary paths recommended by the Section in its Advice of April 2023. This Advice considers the same principles, being the Fiscal Policy Guidelines for 2024 published by the European Commission on 8 March 2023. The priority objectives set by the Section and the methodology underlying the normative budgetary paths are identical to those of last year.
The update of the recommendations was based on the Economic Outlook 2024-2029 published by the Federal Planning Bureau (FPB) on 15 February 2024, taking into account the information available on 9 February 2024.
As in the recent past, this Advice again had to be drawn up in a context of high economic uncertainty. This applies to all estimates and projections made in these turbulent and uncertain times and should encourage caution in policy choices.
The first part of the Advice briefly describes the macroeconomic and fiscal baseline scenario considered as the reference for determining the recommended fiscal adjustment paths. The baseline scenario is based on the aforementioned Medium-Term Economic Outlook of the FPB, which is a contribution to the preparation of the Stability Programme and the National Reform Programme.
The second part is devoted to the special context in 2024 as a justification for an amended advice of the Section.
The third part concerns recommendations and normative adjustment paths for the General Government. The allocation of these paths among different levels of government is included in the annexes to this Advice for illustrative purposes, as the Section will issue an advice in the course of the month of July on the methodology for the allocation of the budgetary targets to be determined in the national medium-term fiscal-structural plan in the future.
The final part explains the planned reform of the European economic governance framework.
The implementation of the new assignment, which was given last year to the Section within the framework of the federal policy regarding public investment, and more specifically the Recovery and Investment Plan, is included in a separate document. It is a prospective consolidation exercise regarding public investment in 2023-2029 made on the basis of the aforementioned Economic Outlook 2024-2029 of the Federal Planning Bureau.