British goverment borrows less in August

British government borrowed less in August as compared with the same period of last year, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on Friday. The ONS said public sector net borrowing excluding temporary effects of financial interventions such as bank bailouts was 13.2 billion pounds (17.8 billion U.S. dollars) in August, 1.3 billion pounds lower than a year earlier. Public sector net debt amounted to 1,193.3 billion pounds at the end of August 2013, equivalent to 74.6 percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP). British government has set a target to cut deficits to no more than 120 billion pounds in 2013. The August figure on government borrowing shows that the austerity measures taken by the coalition government, elected in 2010, are now working. British Finance Minister George Osborne has recently attributed the current economic recovery to the government's persistence in the measures, saying that the recovery was a vindication of his focus on fixing public finances. Osborne declared the government is the winner of the long-running argument over the pace of spending cuts.