PM: Private investment in Russian economy may rise by 10 tln rbl

MOSCOW, Sep 27 (PRIME) -- The government expects private investment in the Russian economy to rise by 10 trillion rubles over six years, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday at a government meeting.

“The most important task is to work with private investors. We expect private investment in the economy to increase by more than 10 trillion rubles over six years. We already made several important decisions for that,” he said.

The decisions include creation of legal framework for public and private partnership, provision of 290 billion rubles for the project financing factory, plans to raise support to small and medium-sized businesses, and joint work with the central bank to flesh out measures for improvement of the financial market, he said.

The government also prolonged redistribution of 1% of the corporate profit tax to regions until 2024 in order to ensure positive changes in the social sphere that authorities had planned before. Federal authorities will also maintain their support to Russian regions, and the amount of subsidies and grants will amount to almost 1.5 trillion rubles in 2019, he said.

The government should use all the money it would get from the retirement age increase – approved by the parliament’s lower house State Duma in the third and final reading earlier on Thursday – to ensure growth of pension payments above inflation, Medvedev said.

“One of our goals is for pensions to grow faster than inflation, which is also our national goal. We should spend all money from the retirement age increase to solve the task. It should allow us to raise pensions by 1,000 rubles a year starting from next year’s January, so that pension payments amount to 20,000 rubles by 2024,” he said.

He also said that the government should continue to work on accessibility of mortgage loans.

“The fourth direction of our work is housing and urban environment, I mean improvement of housing conditions for at least five million families a year until 2024, this is the national goal set by the presidential decree. The figure stood at three million families last year, and I believe that is a big achievement. But we have to enhance measures of state support,” he said.

Russia is capable of building a modern and competitive economy and to speed up the ross domestic product (GDP) growth above the world’s average figure in several coming years, he added.

(65.7585 rubles – U.S. $1)

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