Putin: Russian government still undecided on higher retirement age

MOSCOW, Nov 29 (PRIME) – The government must not decide on the sensitive issue of raising the retirement age behind the scenes, President Vladimir Putin told reporters on Wednesday while visiting a depot of the Moscow Kiyevskaya railway station.

“This is not an idle or a simple issue, this is a very sensitive problem for a large amount of our citizens. You know that we have not made a decision yet, we still have discussions going on,” he said.

Champions of the increase say that a delay of the increase will have a negative impact on incomes of existing pensioners and will hurt the pension system “as its incomes do not cover the spending, so we have to support it constantly with budget money, and capacity of the budget is limited,” he said.

The retirement age was defined in Russia in 1930s and has not changed since that, he said.

Recommendations of the International Labor Organization do not strictly set the retirement age. Life expectancy in Russia is also growing, but lags behind the European figures, and some opponents of the increase say that it may hurt Russia’s labor market, he said.

“We should analyze all these aspects thoroughly – medical and social. And this decision should not be made behind the scenes. It should be done during an extensive discussion with the labor unions, public, and at an expert level, obviously,” he said.

DEMOGRAPHY LAWS PACKAGE

On Tuesday, Putin suggested several bills to support demography, including subsidization of interest rates above 6% on mortgage loans to families that are going to have their second and third children starting from 2018, and a 10,500-ruble monthly payment to families that are going to have their first children starting from 2018.

Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets told reporters that amendments to the budget and regulatory acts that are necessary for implementation of the demographic measures will be done immediately so that these measures come in force on January 1, 2018.

The budget has reserves that the government may spend on the measures. They will require about 80 billion rubles in 2018, or a total of about 500 billion rubles between 2018 and 2020, she said.

The government hopes that restoration of demographic growth will take no more than two years, she added.

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the parliament’s upper house Federation Council, also said that the laws must be approved until the end of 2017, and that members of parliament “are ready to do so even if it means working 24 hours a day.”

(58.4125 rubles – U.S. $1)

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