MOSCOW. (Yevgeny Gontmakher) – Russia will soon have a new president. The era Vladimir Putin launched in 1999 is drawing to a close. However, Russians still expect continued social progress.
That will require new ideas.
In recent years, policy has generally been confined to the short-term perspective, but now that is changing. Many government publications have started to look beyond 2009 to 2010, and some as far into the future as 2020 to 2025.
Just a couple of examples include the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade’s long-term development strategy and “Coalitions for the Future,” a document prepared by the Center for the Development of Information Society (RIO Center).
Of course, the overwhelming majority of people perceive evolution only through changes in their lifestyles. Like people everywhere, Russians are primarily worried about prices, crime, salaries, pensions, housing, health care and education. The social make-up is very uneven, as is typical during a transition.
On this front, we should note that Russia has been experiencing a dynamic consumer boom for a number of years now. Large shopping centers are under construction and supermarkets have replaced small shops in most medium-sized or big cities. The middle class is approaching 20% of the total population, and those who are less well off are also improving their living standards, all the more so since bank loans for cars, furniture, fridges and even mobile phones are readily available. But this glowing picture of nearly European prosperity is marred by several circumstances. The income gap is growing. Only recently, the average income of the top 10% of the social pyramid was 13 times higher than that at the very bottom. Now it has gone up to 15.3 times as high. Rising inflation is hitting the poor hardest, making this picture even worse. By official estimates, last October saw the first month-to-month drop in real wages in many years.
In the last two years, social policy has been focused on so called “national projects,” which are devoted to the most urgent problems of everyday life – education, health care, housing and food. Despite the initial skepticism of some experts, several billion rubles have reached universities, schools and hospitals.
But national projects alone cannot solve the situation. The government needs to carry out reforms and introduce new mechanisms of work. There are several positive examples, such as the introduction of child benefits and attempts to set up modern colleges in Krasnoyarsk and Rostov-on-Don.
However, most of the budget is spent on patching up the worst holes. This is why consumers have not seen too many changes – there are still the same long lines in shabby outpatient clinics, and no free prescriptions.
Reforms need to be thoroughly prepared or they will not have the intended result. This especially applies to affordable housing – still only a dream for most Russian families. Mortgages were supposed to help translate this dream into reality, but inadequate housing construction, the amount of red tape involved in the registration of land plots, an insufficient engineering infrastructure and a shortage of building materials have more than doubled real estate prices. As a result, even most medium-income families are still unable to buy a house.
Russia’s social landscape differs dramatically from one region to another. Remote regions have seen almost no changes in the last few years and can in no way compare with Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities where progress is evident. This is why people continue to migrate to big cities, abandoning Siberia, the Far East, and the European far north.
These social realities show that Russia is approaching another frontier. Only by surmounting these problems will Russia be able to guarantee economic development for years to come. It would be naive to hope that the current trends (even though mostly positive) will be sufficient if Russia hopes to tackle this major challenge.
We need fresh ideas and new approaches to guarantee the continuity of our social policy. We should not forget the main lesson of the last 15 years – that if they are to be positive, changes must combine social expectations, financial and economic realities and the enthusiastic backing of all social forces. This is our main request to those who will soon lead Russia into the future.
Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Studies at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences
The opinions expressed in this article are the author's and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
Source: Rossiiskaya Gazeta
