It has been akin to a cat-and-mouse play between the Iraqi budget for 2015 and the collapse of oil prices in the world. Officials at Haidar al-Abadi’s government are restlessly looking at the prices of oil as if they were shareholders, adding and deducting from the long-anticipated budget according to the changing price of the oil barrel. But the instability of oil prices means that the budget is also inconsistent. The Iraqi budget for this year is explosive as was the case with all the budgets that have preceded it in the previous years. After several studies and negotiations, the Iraqi cabinet presented the budget law to the parliament, with the budget reaching $105bn. Meanwhile, budget deficit reached roughly 20 per cent and the gap is set to be partially fulfilled by a $4.5bn loan from the International Monetary Fund and $2bn loan from the World Bank.
English
Iraq: The conflict over the budget
Articles from Iraq
Under the Cover of Law in Iraq: How Do Men Buy Time at the Expense of Their Children?
Behind the lawyers’ robes and the courthouses, the trickery is carefully orchestrated. Lawyers working in personal status courts report that challenging or denying paternity is frequently offered as a tactical...
Walking the Path of the Sun: The Iraqi-Syrian Border
Within hours, their homeland turned into a ghost town. Women were transformed into commodities traded in slave markets, men were rendered into skeletons jumbled in mass graves, and children were...
A Girl like a Bamboo Reed
Fatima was denied even the dignity of death, though it circled close, its breath thick with the dust of earth. She was abducted by ISIS fighters at the age of...
From the same author
Informal Settlements in Baghdad: Home Is Everywhere
Informal settlements in Baghdad did not develop in one specific form. Some were built on plots of land without title deeds; 98% of which are state-owned and 2% are private...
Iraq’s October Protests: A Political Constant and Social Transformation
As soon as the protests took off, thousands of young people gathered in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, echoing countless concerns and questions. The desperate, the unemployed, the infuriated with families...
Maps of Deprivation and Dissolution in Iraq
In 2011, the Ministry of Planning released a report entitled “Maps of Deprivation in Iraq”; in it, the Iraqi population was divided into a different groups depending on their relationship...