Austria's government plans to maintain a deficit-free budget until 2023, local news agency APA quoted Chancellor Sebastian Kurz as saying on Sunday. Kurz's right-wing coalition government, in office since December 2017, has made fiscal discipline one of its priorities, and the country posted a budget surplus of 0.1 percent of gross domestic product - its first in more than four decades - in 2018, helped by a sharp increase in tax revenues..

Finance Minister Hartwig Loeger said in January he expected a surplus of 730 million euros this year. "We as the federal government want to continue to operate without new debt and without new taxes for the following four years and consistently place the national budget on a solid footing," Kurz was quoted as telling APA.

Copyright Reuters, 2019