General account budget requests for fiscal 1998 will reach 80.54 trillion yen, up 4.1 percent from the initial fiscal 1997 requests, it was learned August 27.
The deadline for filing budget requests is the end of this month. It will be the second year in a row that general account requests have topped 80 trillion yen.
General operation expenditures, which will be used for implementation of policy matters, will be reduced by 0.5 percent from the fiscal 1997 level in accordance with the decision by the Conference on Fiscal Structural Reform, sources said. Policy-related expenditures will amount to 43.56 trillion yen, representing the first reduction from the previous fiscal year in 11 years.
But the total budget will increase due to increases in debt-servicing costs and tax grants to local governments, the sources said. Thus the government will be forced to issue deficit-covering bonds for three years in a row at the start of the budget year.
Debt-servicing costs will increase by 1.25 trillion yen, or 7.5 percent, to 18.05 trillion yen, and tax grants to local governments will increase by 14.4 percent to 17.71 trillion yen.