Pres aide says measures from Putin’s address forbid manual ruling

MOSCOW, Mar 16 (PRIME) -- The measures announced by President Vladimir Putin in his address to the Federation Council, the parliament’s supreme chamber, are much more demanding than his 2012 program and cannot be implemented with the help of hands-on management, aide Andrei Belousov told reporters on Friday.

In the address of March 1, Putin prioritized gross domestic product (GDP) growth at a pace no slower than that around with world and its increase per capita, pension increase above inflation, further growth of state employees’ salaries, a twofold healthcare spending increase, real income growth and an at least halving of the poverty level.

Belousov said, “I can say that the tasks set by the current address are of a larger scale than the 2012 orders and one-man control is impossible here. It will not cope with the tasks the country is facing in the long-term. A different mechanism is needed.”

Belousov also said that the measures do not exceed the budget, “A volume like this was prepared, which included detailed work on every single feature of the address, which was presented by the president and of course, there were serious financial calculations in it because we needed to see that the stipulations voiced by the president do not exceed the limits of our budget system, that everything is fulfilled.”

Fulfillment of the goals would require an equivalent of 1.5% of the GDP. “The main, the most intensive receivers, where underpayments are the largest are healthcare and infrastructure because they are most capital intensive. Digitalization is also a costly story,” Belousov said, adding that economic growth will help earn resources amounting to 1% of the GDP.

A 3.5–4% increase of GDP instead of the current 2% would cover two thirds of Putin’s program, Belousov said.

He said that Russia can do better than Germany in terms of the purchasing power parity by 2024 if it fulfills Putin’s orders.

The Russian authorities plan to reduce the defense spending share in the GDP and to raise the efficiency of spending on the other areas. Under the program announced by Putin, tens of billion rubles can be saved in the sphere of major construction work, the aide said.

The mortgage rate under the program must fall to 7% by 2024 and at least 2 million families must be able to take mortgages per year by 2024, Belousov said.

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