| Three mistakes of the reconstruction of Russia The need for institutional reforms seems to be beyond doubt. However, the government is in no hurry to do this, despite the favorable external environment and the president’s high ratings. Moreover, the few reforms that the authorities have decided to undertake invariably do not go as planned. Yesterday, the progress of reforms was assessed by Andrey Neshchadin, executive director of the Expert Institute at the RSPP. He believes that “failures are not accidental.” Actually, the government has few reforms to its credit: administrative, which even the president said was being carried out on the wrong scale and in the wrong time frame; pension, which had to be adjusted a year later; and the reform to monetize benefits, which provoked mass protests at the beginning of the year.
According to Mr. Neshchadin, all recent reforms have three methodological errors. First, there is a lack of necessary information to guide reform planning. “All the information the government receives is either half-hearted, distorted or simply non-existent,” he said. When preparing the law on the monetization of benefits, it was not even possible to correctly determine the number of beneficiaries. Not to mention the fact that Mikhail Zurabov publicly admitted that it is impossible to adequately calculate the amount of compensation for free travel, since separate accounting for all seventy categories of beneficiaries has never been kept.
Secondly, says Andrei Neshchadin, there is no mechanism for taking into account expert opinion when preparing bills. For example, there has not been a single discussion of education reform with business, although it, along with the state, is the main consumer of this service. “They tell us, well, you write what you need, and we’ll see,” Mr. Neshchadin described the method of government officials working with experts.
The third mistake of the authorities, in the analyst’s opinion, is the lack of explanatory work about the essence of the bills. As sociological surveys by the Levada Center conducted on the eve of the entry into force of the monetization law showed, 63% of respondents did not know how much they would receive instead of benefits in kind.
However, the government itself admits its mistakes and is trying to correct them in various ways. For example, pensions were increased. But there are fears that in the coming changes the authorities will again step on the same rake. What lies ahead are large-scale and extremely sensitive transformations for the population, such as reforms in housing and communal services, education, healthcare, and municipal reform. In addition, the possibly negative results of the pension reform will soon make themselves felt. After all, the results of the Pension Fund's placement of citizens' savings funds for 2004 have not yet been announced, recalls Andrei Neshchadin. He does not understand “if reforms are carried out primarily in the interests of the population, then why should they suffer from them.” Vera SITNINA |
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