The Indonesian government plans to launch the 73.3 trillion rupiah (about 6.1 billion U.S. dollars) fiscal stimulus package on March 1 to tackle the looming impact of the global financial crisis, an official said on Wednesday.
"Last night DPR (the House of Representatives) approved the fiscal stimulus. In the next five days, all the documents related to the program will be completed," the national Antara news agency on Wednesday quoted the Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati as saying.
According to Mulyani, part of the fiscal stimulus related to taxes has already been carried out since January 2009 when a new income tax law began to take effect.
Mulyani said that in the fiscal stimulus, only the infrastructure expenditure had been raised by 2 trillion rupiah ( about 170 million dollars) to 73.3 trillion rupiah from 71.3 trillion rupiah (6 billion dollar) as proposed by the government previously.
The 73.3 trillion rupiah package consisted of taxation stimulus worth 56.3 trillion rupiah and state expenditure stimulus worth 17 trillion rupiah (141.7 billion dollar).
Of the taxation stimulus part, there are reduced tax tariffs, government-borne value added tax and import duties and incentives related to income tax.
The state expenditure stimulus part consisted of infrastructure expenditure worth 12.2 trillion rupiah (1.02 billion dollar) and direct subsidy and energy subsidy worth 4.8 trillion rupiah (400 million dollar).
The stimulus package is expected to increase a deficit in the 2009 state budget to 139.5 trillion rupiah (11.62 billion dollar) from 51.3 trillion rupiah (4.27 billion dollar) previously or to 2. 5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) from 1 percent of the GDP.
(Xinhua News Agency February 25, 2009)
