LONDON (AFP) – Iraq's economy has been hit hard by the global financial crisis and particularly the drop in the price of oil, and 2010 is set to be a difficult year, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh said Friday.

“The financial crisis has had a serious impact (on the Iraqi economy)... the plummeting oil prices really forced us to constrain our government spending,” he told a think-tank in London.
Saleh said Iraq had last month been forced to cut its overall budget by nearly a quarter to around 60 billion dollars and still projected a 20-billion-dollar (15-billion-euro) deficit.
“2009, I expect that we will be able to manage it, but 2010 will be a difficult year” because government surpluses would have been severely depleted by then.
Oil prices have dropped from just above 145 dollars a barrel in March 2008, to around 50 dollars a barrel at present.
Saleh also said that the top concerns for potential investors at the “Invest Iraq 2009” conference in London a day earlier had been the country's legislative environment and the security situation.