Ministry suggests 2 tln rbl investment from NWF to infrastructure

MOSCOW, Feb 5 (PRIME) -- The Transport Ministry has prepared a 2 trillion ruble list of transport infrastructure facilities, in which the government may invest money from the National Wealth Fund (NWF), First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov said on Wednesday at a meeting of President Vladimir Putin with the government.

“The Transport Ministry has tentatively prepared proposals for the list. The proposals include 62 facilities worth over 2 trillion rubles. We will submit it to a working group of the State Council, we will work on that. We will finish the work and get the result on time,” Belousov said.

Previously, Putin ordered the government to prepare a list of infrastructure projects that would receive investment from the National Wealth Fund before June 1.

Investment of 300 billion rubles from the fund per year would not have a significant impact on inflation in the country, he said.

“Now the fund has accumulated more than 7.8 trillion rubles, almost 8 trillion rubles, it meets the defined safety threshold of 7% of GDP. The estimates that we have and that were coordinated with the Bank of Russia say that investment of about 300 billion rubles from the fund to the economy per year are inflationary safe,” Belousov said, adding that private investors should invest 4 rubles of their money per each ruble of investment from the fund.

He also said that the government and the central bank agreed to create a permanent consultative mechanism to assess the economic situation as the national projects are implemented. The project will result in a serious inflow of liquidity to the economy calling for fine tuning not to destroy the macroeconomic balance and not to speed up inflation, he said.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said that more than 561,000 Russian families will obtain the right to receive maternity capital for their firstborn children this year, and about 552,000 families will get the money for a second child. The measures will demand 122 billion rubles of budget spending in 2020, 210.7 billion rubles in 2021, and 265.8 billion rubles in 2022, she said.

“These funds were earmarked in the federal budget, we are preparing amendments, and we also prepared amendments to the Pension Fund’s budget,” she said.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that the government has mobilized the resources necessary for the social measures listed by Putin in his address to the Federal Assembly. The measures were coordinated with the Finance Ministry.

“The work on improvement of the demographic situation is aimed at achievement of two national goals that you’ve set: the goal of raising life expectancy and natural increase of population,” he said, adding that the social measures together with other measures should speed up the increase of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP).

“I will name only several steps that we think would allow us to achieve GDP growth. First, it is expansion of consumer demand through measures of the social package, creation of additional demand for Russian cars and equipment in the framework of national projects and of the imports substitution program that we want to continue. It also includes an increase of exports of non-oil and gas and non-energy goods,” he said.

The government plans to consider amendments to the federal budget at a meeting next week, and the Finance Ministry would prepare corresponding amendments as soon as possible, he said.

Belousov also said that the social measures should add 1 percentage point to growth of the retail trade turnover per year, or additional 0.3 percentage points to the GDP increase. Excluding the investment part, social measures should add 185 billion rubles to consumer demand in 2020, almost 400 billion rubles in 2021, and more than 400 billion rubles per year after that, he said.

“Russian families will spend these funds mainly on procurement of goods and services, procurement of products of the food industry, agriculture, light industry and so on. This factor alone should add additional 1% of growth to the retail trade turnover, or plus 0.3% to the GDP increase correspondingly,” he said.

Additional demand for products of the Russian machine-building industry should amount to 500 billion rubles in 2020, 556 billion rubles in 2021, and more than 600 billion rubles in the future, which adds about 3.5–4% to the internal machine-building market that amounts to 14 trillion rubles, he said.

In his turn, Putin said that there will not be any other chance for implementation of his address and it is unlikely that Russia would accumulate such a large amount of money to do that in the future. The quality of work is important, and composition of the government is optimal for that, he said.

“I think that the current composition of the government doesn’t have a single minute for a ramp-up, we have no right for that, no one should hide behind the fact that they didn’t know something. Everyone knows everything, everyone has set their minds for work, everyone knows their material,” he said.

(63.4342 rubles – U.S. $1)

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