Written answers

Tuesday, 17 November 2020

Department of Public Expenditure and Reform

Public Expenditure Policy

Photo of John LahartJohn Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)
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97. To ask the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform the expenditure on health, social welfare and education as a share of GNI* for 2019 and 2020; the estimate for 2021; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [36664/20]

Photo of Michael McGrathMichael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail)
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Expenditure on the key front line areas of Health, Social Protection and Education makes up the majority of public expenditure each year. These sectors have also been a crucial part of the response to Covid-19 and as such, have been allocated significant additional resources in order to support the State’s response to the pandemic.

The Economic and Fiscal Outlook, published by the Department of Finance on Budget Day, set out GNI* for 2019 as well as estimates of GNI* for 2020 and 2021. In 2019, GNI* amounted to €213,700 million. GNI* is estimated to be €202,825 million in 2020 and €208,350 million 2021.

Based on these figures and current estimates of expenditure, gross voted Health expenditure amounts to 8.2%, c. 10% and 10.6% of GNI* for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021 respectively. Gross voted expenditure on Social Protection, inclusive of expenditure on the Social Insurance Fund, amounts to 9.7%, 15.6% and 12.1% for 2019, 2020 and 2021 respectively. Finally, gross voted expenditure on Education over the three year period amounts to 5.1%, 5.9% and 5.8% respectively. In order to provide a like-for-like comparison over the three years, expenditure on the new Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science for 2020 and 2021 has been included alongside that by the Department of Education to arrive at these figures.

Taken together, expenditure on these three areas amount to 23% of GNI* for 2019, 31.5% in 2020 and 28.5% in 2021.

In addition, as outlined in the Expenditure Report 2021, there are unallocated amounts in respect of a Covid-19 Contingency Reserve of €2.1 billion and a Recovery Fund of €3.4 billion.  The allocation of additional resources to these sectors from these unallocated amounts would impact on the ratios for 2021.

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