Business daily Világgazdaság speculates that Hungary is going to lift the retail price of natural gas by another 40-50% from January 2007, following the recently announced 30% increase in August 2006. According to the newspaper this is due to the plan of the government to switch from the current consumption based subsidy system to a social-based compensation. As a result, government plans to cut annual natural gas subsidy from the current HUF 160bn to HUF 35-40bn by 2008.
According to the information of the newspaper, government doesn’t want to publish its plans how to cut budget spending/reform the expenditure side of the budget until December, due to the coming municipality elections in Oct-Nov.