Translated material
A thousand and one reasons
Russians do not yet have sufficient incentives for voluntary pension contributions
The new pension strategy for stimulating voluntary pension contributions, when for every thousand rubles of voluntary contribution the investor will receive another thousand from the state, announced by President Vladimir Putin in his last annual message to the Federal Assembly , so far makes experts wary of it. To whom this proposal is addressed and how soon it can be implemented, participants of the FBK Economic Club discussed on Tuesday at the round table “1000+1000: assessments and prospects.”The “invest a thousand” promotion is unlikely to stimulate voluntary pension savings, but it can increase the assets of management companies and activate the stock market - experts have come to this conclusion. True, and this is not bad: investing in the stock market for young people is much more attractive than pension savings in their pure form.
State participation in voluntary pension insurance of citizens will not be too cheap for the treasury. According to calculations by the Ministry of Finance, for the implementation of this initiative in 2008, the amount of state co-financing will be 6 billion rubles, in 2018 - already 60 billion rubles. on the basis that within ten years the number of “volunteers” willing to participate in the campaign will increase from the estimated 500 thousand to 5 million people.
Among the known conditions of the program is that contributions will be invested so as not to depreciate. The rest of the idea is unclear: will the campaign to attract voluntary investments become voluntary or voluntary-compulsory, what will be the status of investments if half of them should belong to the state, how “self-employed” workers will be able to save for retirement, and, most importantly, how much will be possible to invest? , counting on co-financing from the state.
The growing deficit of the Pension Fund, as well as the inherent desire of Russians to save (not necessarily pension funds, but money on deposits, in stocks and bonds) theoretically create good preconditions for the idea of \u200b\u200b“1000+1000” to find its addressee. According to Rosstat, the so-called savings rate (as a percentage of disposable cash income) among Russians over the past three years has varied at the level of 16.8-19.9%. This is respectively three times higher than in Kazakhstan, one and a half times higher than in France and Germany, almost five and eight times higher than in Korea and Poland. In the United States, the year before last, a negative savings rate was generally recorded, when consumption expenses exceed income.
With all this, the Russian authorities are not yet very active in convincing citizens of the benefits of pension savings. There is not enough explanatory work here, Igor Nikolaev, director of the FBK strategic analysis department, is sure. “To stimulate voluntary pension savings, it is also necessary to introduce benefits for the payment of the single social tax for employers and tax deductions for individuals transferring funds from their salaries to pensions,” Mr. Nikolaev believes. It would be a good idea to increase the share of funds (currently 5%) that corporate pension funds can invest in the securities of their founders and investors, the expert believes. Otherwise, the economist is sure, the only task that will be solved with the help of the “1000+1000” initiative will be the replenishment of assets of management companies at the budget expense and the activation of the Russian stock market.
According to the scientific director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Evgeniy Gontmakher, the ideology of the new pension initiative looks very attractive in the president’s message, but there are fears that when implemented by the government, it will lose a significant part of its attractiveness for the population, especially since the Ministry of Finance is not interested in increasing spending . “Very young people cannot allocate an extra thousand from the budget, state employees too, and those who are older would like to “hand over” more money, but the law will certainly set limits at 18-20 thousand per year, so the increase in pension It will turn out completely symbolic,” he explained. If there was a coefficient of 100+1000 for state employees, then the idea would certainly find an addressee, the expert is sure. In his opinion, it is not clear how people older than 1967, who do not have savings accounts at all, will be able to take advantage of the proposed opportunity, and whether the Pension Fund will take cash from those who want to voluntarily save for retirement.
“It is not entirely clear who the mysterious subject is who will want to join the 1000+1000 campaign,” Tatyana Maleeva, director of the independent Institute of Social Policy, agreed with Evgeniy Gontmakher. Among people under 35, she said, only half are thinking about retirement, and among 50-year-olds, only a quarter.
“We should not forget that the president’s proposals boiled down not only to the idea of an additional thousand from the state for every thousand of a citizen’s voluntary pension contributions, but also concerned increasing the size of pensions and improving the administration of pension contributions; and the pension sector is not an area where you can expect quick results from reforms. After all, in Germany and other European countries, reform is also stalled,” recalled Auditor of the Accounts Chamber Sergei Agaptsov. “It’s good that the state stimulates people’s desire to save and invest; even public IPOs fall into this category,” he is confident
True, a beautiful “shell” for stimulating savings in the form of voluntary pension contributions has not yet been worked out. And until people know for sure that their money will not depreciate and that in five years another radical pension reform will not take place, the majority of Russians are unlikely to trust such savings instruments as pension contributions.