Libya debates the budget in dinars, but the state’s real constraint is measured in dollars. The relationship between those two accounts — not either one in isolation — explains the pressure on prices, reserves and the exchange rate.

In the first seven months of 2025, the Central Bank reported oil revenue and royalties of $13.9 billion against foreign-currency uses of $19.1 billion, a gap of $5.2 billion. By the end of August, oil inflows had reached $15.8 billion while uses rose to $21.7 billion, widening the flow gap to $5.9 billion.

Those figures do not mean that Libya had run out of foreign assets. The same August statement put total foreign assets at $97.3 billion, up from $95.3 billion at the end of 2024. Valuation changes, investment income, gold and other balance-sheet movements can affect that stock. The point is different: current oil receipts were not covering current foreign-currency demand, and the public was not given one complete bridge explaining how the difference was financed.

Two ledgers, one economy

A dinar expenditure statement records salaries, subsidies, development and operating costs. A foreign-exchange statement records letters of credit, personal allocations, government uses and other transfers. Each is useful. Neither is sufficient alone.

A salary payment becomes demand for imported food, medicine, vehicles, construction materials or savings in a harder currency. A fuel subsidy creates both a dinar cost and a foreign-currency requirement for imports, refinery inputs and replacement volumes. A development allocation may look modest in the domestic budget but generate a much larger call on dollars if the project is import-intensive.

The public accounts should therefore connect the two ledgers. For each major spending category, policymakers need to know the estimated import content and timing of foreign-currency demand. Without that connection, fiscal decisions are made in one unit while their consequences arrive in another.

$5.9bn

was the gap between reported oil inflows and foreign-currency uses in the first eight months of 2025.

Growth in demand needs a public explanation

The pressure continued into 2026. Central Bank data show that total foreign-currency uses rose from $3.574 billion in January and February 2025 to $5.537 billion in the same period of 2026 — an increase of 35.4 per cent. Letters of credit represented 70.4 per cent of the 2026 total, personal-purpose allocations 16.1 per cent and transfers 13.4 per cent.

That composition should be the start of scrutiny, not the end of disclosure. Aggregate totals tell the public which channel was used. They do not show concentration among beneficiaries, the sectors and countries receiving the allocations, the time between approval and settlement, or whether the imported goods entered the domestic market at prices consistent with official-rate access.

Transparency does not require publishing legitimate commercial secrets. It requires a disclosure standard strong enough to detect concentration, unusual growth and mismatches between allocation and delivery. Beneficiary identifiers can be published with registration numbers; sector and country data can be aggregated; banks can report processing times and rejected applications; customs data can be reconciled after a defined period.

A monthly foreign-currency account

Libya needs one monthly public statement that starts with oil and other dollar inflows, records every major use, explains valuation and investment changes, and ends with a reconciled movement in reserves. It should be published in machine-readable form as well as PDF, with stable definitions and revisions clearly marked.

The statement should also connect exchange-rate fees to the fiscal account. The Central Bank reported 16 billion dinars in fee revenue by August 2025. Readers should be able to see how that revenue was treated, which obligations it financed and whether it reduced or merely relocated the underlying deficit.

This is not a technical request for accountants. Foreign currency determines the availability and price of essential goods, the viability of businesses and the real value of household income. Treating it as a complete public budget would improve both policy and accountability. The first question is not simply how many dollars were sold. It is who received them, for what economic purpose, under which rule, and with what measurable result.