Agenda: The federal budget and the budgets of the Pension Fund, Social Insurance Fund and Federal Mandatory Health Insurance Fund in 2015; efficiency of federal programmes.
Excerpts from Dmitry Medvedev’s opening remarks:
Government Meeting
I have signed a directive to establish a Technological Development Agency, which will oversee the transfer of promising Russian and foreign technologies and the development of high-tech industrial production. It will help Russian companies acquire patents and technical knowledge, facilitate technology localisation projects in Russia, and support our businesses during licencing transactions and the creation of joint ventures.
We are entering the next budget cycle, and hence we need to analyse our performance last year.
While streamlining budget expenditures, which was unavoidable, we needed to preserve at least the smallest volume of budget investments. We needed to continue to finance key infrastructure projects, the import substitution programme and housing construction, support key industrial sectors and agriculture and help the regions honour their social obligations without spurring inflation or seriously increasing the budget deficit.
We managed to maintain budget stability last year, which rating agencies and everyone who is monitoring our economic development have noted. We still have substantial reserves, a small sovereign debt and a low budget deficit, which was 2.4 percent of the GDP last year.
Our budget revenue exceeded 13.5 trillion roubles. More than half of all revenue or 57 percent came from the non-commodity sectors. This is a very important change in the makeup of our revenue, which is rooted not only in economic restructuring but is also connected with the market situation. The figure was below 49 percent in 2014. Our expenditures totalled some 15.5 trillion roubles.
The bulk of federal allocations, or approximately 27.3 percent of the budget, went into financing our social obligations. Funding to support the regions exceeded 1.6 trillion roubles.
Federal budget expenditures were executed to 98.5 percent of the updated quarterly budget breakdown.
We had 39 federal programmes with 7.5 trillion roubles’ worth of total funding, and nearly 4 trillion roubles were attracted from regional and municipal budgets.
A few words about the execution of the budgets of state extra-budgetary funds, in particular, the Pension Fund, the Social Insurance Fund and the Mandatory Health Insurance Fund. The revenues of these increased in 2015. We allocated additional funds when necessary.
The execution of financial commitments under the basic healthcare programme reached 100.9 percent. The regional governments also allocated over 82 billion roubles to finance high-tech medical assistance under the basic programme.
The bulk of allocations from the Social Insurance Fund were used to pay maternity and childcare benefits (over 270 billion roubles) and sick leaves (about 194 billion roubles).
As for the Pension Fund, the burden on it is very heavy. However, its dependence on federal budget transfers has decreased.
