Macao's public revenue surges 40.6% in Q1 of 2008

MACAO, April 18 (Xinhua) -- Thanks to the booming gaming industry, Macao's public revenue for the first three months of 2008 posts a dramatic year-on-year increase of 40.6 percent to over 13 billion patacas (about 1.63 billion U.S. dollars), according to official figures released on Friday.

With public expenditure for the first quarter of this year standing at 2.9 billion patacas (365 million U.S. dollars), up 32.9 percent over the same period of last year, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) recorded an overall surplus of 10.1 billion patacas (1.264 billion U.S. dollars) in public finance, according to statistics released by the SAR government's Finance Service Bureau (DSF).

The DSF figures also showed that local direct taxes from gaming, markedly rising by 52.7 percent year-on-year to 10.187 billion patacas (1.27 billion U.S. dollars), still contributed a major part to the total public revenue in the period, while other direct taxes dropped 23 percent to merely 308 million patacas (38.5 million U.S. dollars).

In 2007, Macao's gaming taxes grew by 48 percent over the previous year to 29.3 billion patacas (3.7 billion U.S. dollars), leading to an overall surplus of 21.8 billion patacas (2.7 billion U.S. dollars) in public finance.