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Hello fellow e-Belgians and other interested readers,

This is a report on income and expenses for the last 30 days, from 2052 to 2081 of the New World. This time we will also present some long term charts, providing a view on the last 357 days.

Since the situation is similar as before, but it seems a lot of new players are not aware of it, here is a short recap on some of the financial history of eBelgium and summary on the current situation with fancy graphs!



Some history to provide context to newer players
Joining eRep roughly 18 months ago, economy was viable, and at the start of a serious increase. Behind the scenes an eRep bot (from the admins) was buying large quantities of goods from the market, artificially increasing the price, and pumping fresh CC into the market.

To give you an idea, currently no new CC enters the market. At the same time CC leaves the market each time you sign MPP's, buy guerrilla equipment, or buy storage or raw material buildings for CC.

CC's spent on the market to buy goods are not leaving the market, it is shared between the producer and the countries that raise taxes on those goods. Taxes are then stockpiled in national treasuries and can be spend by the country as desired.

Illustrating this with some figures:
Day 1200: Monthly average tax income of 16.000CC
Day 1300: Monthly average tax income of 59.000CC
Day 1400: Monthly average tax income of 97.000CC
Day 1500: Monthly average tax income of 179.000CC (start peak of income)
Day 1600: Monthly average tax income of 2.136.355CC (peak of income)
Day 1700: Monthly average tax income of 999.000CC (end peak of income)
Day 1800: Monthly average tax income of 34.000CC
Day 1900: Monthly average tax income of 48.000CC
Day 2000: Monthly average tax income of 64.000CC
Day 2080: Monthly average tax income of 30.000CC

Note: Monthly average tax income is always calculated on the average of the previous 30 days.

Some clarifications to the above:
- Some peaks that are not in the right trend can be explained by training wars, or support programs where a lot of supplies are provided by the state and where individual players usually also buy more supplies themselves, leading to occasional peaks in our tax income as more goods are being sold on our market.
- The low income average for 2080 started mainly after the reduction of the import tax. The idea was to lower prices on our market making it easier for younger people to buy goods on one side, and to attrackt more foreign sellers to sell on our market to increase the volume being traded, in order to still have the same or higher tax income. The second part does not seem to be materialising.
- Together with the increase of tax income we saw a rise of the price of CC / gold, now we see the opposite, with a sharp decline following the drop of tax income. Figures can be found below.



Frequently asked questions:

Is our income bad?
Yes, with around 30K we can barely pay for our MPP's. Currently 3, they use all of our tax income. In addition we have other expenses that are eating from our reserves, such as citizen packs for younger players, and supplies for ABC and BNA, these are the so called state programs.

Are we in trouble?
Not yet, we have established significant reserves during the "huge peak of income", and we are now slowly spending that excess reserve. We also recently (day 1980) received a huge donation from Backwards, which gives us some extra breathing room. However without an improvement of our income, we may deplete the excess reserves within 6 to 9 months. (According to eBelgian law we need to keep a minimum reserve for crisis situations such as war times, anything above is considered as "excess reserves". See state budget law: http://www.erepbelgium.com/t4753-state-budget-law).

Are we the only country facing this?
No, the economic situation is roughly the same for each country. Individual countries may have larger or smaller reserves, and have a different spending policy, but their income situation is relatively the same (in relation to amount of citizens).

What can we do to improve our income?
Unfortunately, not that much.
- State supplies are bought on our own market whenever possible to make sure the taxes flow back to the eBe treasury.
- Different income tax rates have been used, but none of them has a serious impact on our tax revenue due to
- Overall limited amount of eBe players working daily
- Few players working in Belgium, a lot of players look for jobs abroad because they pay better
- Players working for the minimal wage, in exchange for part of the production (the so called communes, state factories, supply officers, or whatever you want to call them). Since the production part of their wage is donated, these players bypass the income tax
- Different VAT rates have a minor impact on our income, but it is a balance exercise between too high VAT (people buy/sell goods abroad to avoid having to pay high amount of tax) and low VAT (people buy/sell locally, but the volume of trade is not significant enough to generate huge tax revenues when only a low VAT is imposed).
- Different import tax rates seem to have a higher impact on our income, considering the relatively big drop after reducing our import taxes to 1%. Discussions are on-going on increasing the import tax again... You can contribute to the discussion on our forum (http://www.erepbelgium.com/t9494-increase-of-import-tax-to-2, http://www.erepbelgium.com/t9497-raise-of-import-tax-for-food-raw-materials-to-35)

You can see all our tax settings in the country’s economy page: http://www.erepublik.com/en/country/economy/Belgium



Current situation (and history) in graphs:

Daily average income last 30 days

Peaks due to training war and state buying supplies, average around 1K cc/day

Daily income since 1724 (almost a full year)

We see the end of the "peak of income", and after that a rough average of 1.5k cc/day, with a noticeable drop at the end, coinciding with the drop in import tax (my interpretation).

Monthly average income last 30 days

Current income is flirting with 30K average, sometimes below, sometimes above. This barely covers the cost of 3 MPP's.

Monthly average income since 1724 (almost a full year)

You see the end of the "peak of income" as explained at the start of the article, then the average hovers around 50K, with 2 lows going below 30K cc.

National reserves last 30 days

Small drop accounted to loans granted during the last in-game upgrade offer. As you can see they have almost been paid back in full.

National reserves since 1724 (almost a full year)

More worrying, you see the overall decrease of reserves over time, specifically regular drops around 1835, 1930, 2030. These drops are in fact due to the "monthly" budget that gets used to buy supplies for state programs. As you can see the monthly budget that we are entitled to spend actually is stretched as long as possible and allows to cover roughly 100 days. Other than these expenses we do not really touch our reserves. The huge peak around 1980 is due to the generous donation of Backwards when he retired from the game.

Note: National reserves are expressed as the total value in CC of both the CC and the gold reserves. Although the above shows a drop in value of 1.5 million CC, a big part of this drop is associated to the devaluation of gold. An increase in the gold value, will also increase the value of our total reserves.

Gold price last 30 days

Pretty stable around 223, 222 CC / gold.

Gold price since 1724 (almost a full year)

Huge drop, in line with the end of the "peak of income". It still gradually drops, but is rather stable around 223, 222 cc / gold



Conclusions:
Yes the economy is bad, no we can't really make a significant change to our income, although we can try to tweak it so we get the best from the circumstances. This is a bit trial and error I'm afraid.
Yes our reserves are decreasing, but not overly fast. We still have a lot more in our reserves than we are forced to keep by law, so we can maintain the current rate of expenses several months longer if the situation remains the same.
Additional income would be nice, so if you have ideas or tips, feel free to let me know.

I hope you found this interesting, feel free to post your feedback in the comments or contact me directly.

SX80,
MoF