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CAIRO - Egypt's cabinet approved a draft budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 with an expected 6.6% deficit, it said in a statement on Wednesday.
The 2021/22 draft budget, which targets a primary surplus of 1.5%, forecasts revenue of 1.3 trillion Egyptian pounds ($82.75 billion), up from 1.17 trillion pounds this year.
No figure was given for total expenditures. Some 87.8 billion Egyptian pounds ($5.59 billion) were allocated to subsidise supply commodities and farmers, the statement said.
The planning minister forecast earlier on Wednesday that the economy would grow by 5.4% in fiscal 2021/22 with a targeted 1.3 trillion Egyptian pounds in investments, part of a sustainable development plan approved by the cabinet on Wednesday, the statement said.
The economy grew by an annualised 1.35% in the six months from July to December 2020.
($1 = 15.7100 Egyptian pounds)
(Reporting by Momen Saeed Atalah, Writing by Nafisa Eltahir and Patrick Werr; Editing by Alison Williams and Steve Orlofsky) ((Nafisa.Eltahir@thomsonreuters.com;))