(Adds deputy finmin on growth, paragraph 11)
By Pawel Sobczak and Kuba Jaworowski
WARSAW, March 6 (Reuters) - A deputy finance minister denied suggestions on Friday that Poland would need to raise its budget deficit this year as a sharp economic downturn erodes revenues.
The centre-right government has pledged to maintain a tight fiscal policy despite the global recession as it prepares Poland to join the pre-euro European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM2) in coming months and to adopt the common currency in 2012.
But economists now predict growth in the European Union's largest ex-communist economy will slow to 1.4 percent in 2009, below the government's "worst-case scenario" of 1.7 percent, and some say this makes upward revision of the deficit inevitable.
"The Finance Ministry does not plan to increase the budget deficit planned at 18.2 billion zlotys ($4.87 billion) in 2009," Deputy Finance Minister Elzbieta Suchocka-Roguska told Reuters.
Suchocka-Roguska, who is responsible for the budget at the ministry, was referring to the central state budget, which forms the biggest part of the general government deficit that Poland must keep below 3 percent to be eligible for euro zone entry.
"The general government deficit in 2009 will not exceed 3 percent (of Gross Domestic Product)," Suchocka-Roguska said.
Earlier, another deputy finance minister and Poland's central bank governor both raised the possibility of an increased budget deficit due to slowing growth.
"It is possible that the nominal deficit will be slightly raised. This is a matter of how much revenues decline and what will be the options for further savings," Deputy Finance Minister Ludwik Kotecki told public radio.
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Central bank governor Slawomir Skrzypek, often at odds with the government over policy, told TVN CNBC: "The risks I've been warning about are coming to life. At the moment we have a high budget deficit and another budget revision seems inevitable."
The global crisis and falling demand for exports have hit industrial output in recent months. Rising unemployment and slowing demand have in turn hurt private consumption and corporate investment levels, resulting in lower state revenues.
Kotecki later told Reuters Polish economic growth in the first quarter of 2009 was expected to be about 2 percent year-on-year, down from 2.9 percent in the previous quarter.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk's cabinet has frequently said it will not raise the budget deficit and would rather cut spending to offset revenue losses stemming from the slowdown than try to stimulate the economy by increased spending.
"I think the government will wait until the middle of the year to be able to better forecast the impact of the recession on revenues," said Marcin Mroz, chief economist at Fortis Bank Polska in Warsaw.
"Then they'll look at how much they can cut expenditure and the (scale of) revision will be a result of the two factors."
Tusk's government has said it hopes to start formal talks with EU institutions this month on putting the zloty into ERM-2, where it would trade in a fixed range against the euro.
Poland's regional peers have also pledged to speed up their euro zone entry plans in search of a protective umbrella after their currencies took a beating when investors fled European emerging markets in search of safer assets.
Hungary sees its 2009 budget gap at 2.6 percent. The Czech Republic envisages a shortfall amounting to 4 percent of GDP. (Additional reporting by Patryk Wasilewski) (Writing by Gareth Jones; Editing by Andy Bruce)