Press release No. 121 of 7 April 2017
WIESBADEN – In 2016, the core and extra budgets of the overall public budget – as defined in public finance statistics – recorded a financial surplus of 25.8 billion euros. Based on provisional results of the quarterly cash statistics, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) also reports that the cash surplus declined by 3.4 billion euros on a year earlier (2015: 29.1 billion euros). The reason was the decline in the financial surplus of the Federation to 5.0 billion euros in 2016 (2015: 20.6 billion euros) due to the fact that the expenditure of the Federation increased more (+6.3%) than its revenue (+1.6%). Expenditure increased especially for continuous grants and financial contributions (+6.5%), continuous material expenditure (+7.6%), investments in material assets (+11.4%), and grants and financial contributions for investments (+11.1%).