President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko urged members of the Council of the House of Representatives during an address on Monday to not be wasteful when creating the country's budget for 2015.

“As far as I can understand, the government and the parliament are working on the bill as we agreed,"  Lukashenko said. "I would very much like us to seriously approach this bill. We cannot afford a wasteful budget. We have no money to spare. We have to count every cent.”

He urged legislators to focus on economy modernization.

“Many people say that modernization is not an option, no money is available for it and so on," Lukashenko said. "But we cannot postpone modernization and improvement of our enterprises till tomorrow. If we fail to replace an old machine tool today with a new one that makes competitive products, then market diversification and the competitive ability on international markets go out of the window. We will not be able to sell products made using old machine tools. Therefore, modernization is a must if we want to live on, to compete and sell our products."