On 11 January, President of Latvia Egils Levits met with Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš to discuss the state budget planning and composition.
Statement by the President Levits following the meeting:
‘Mr Kariņš and I met for the first time this year to primarily talk about the state budget. We discussed budget planning and some specific lines.
I reiterated the need to increase public funding of research and innovations, including earmarking of 50% of funding for research institutions as the basic research funding and 50% to be disbursed through projects. These institutions are mostly collecting funding through projects right now. This does not contribute to development of science.
We also discussed the need to increase funding for national, internal security, for interior sector.
We talked about teacher scholarship programme to encourage students to consider Latvian language, European official language and natural science teaching so that we would have enough subject teachers in several years from now. We are on the brink of a crisis as we actually lack the necessary number of such teachers. Schools are expected to move to Latvian-only education in three years, so this is urgent. We need the teachers, we need to start training them now, and need to have funding for that in our budget.
We also discussed defence spending and other budget lines – health and education. Mr Prime Minister will provide further comments on that’.
