Komsomolskaya Pravda: "Russia is ranked third in the world by economic growth"
Cabinet ministers have discussed the financial results for the past year.
There was a classic combination of good and bad news in Prime Minister Putin's first presidium meeting of the year. The prime minister decided to start with the good news: Russia had climbed to third place in the world in terms of GDP growth. In the last year the economy grew by 4.2%. The first place was taken by China with a GDP growth of 9.5%, followed by India with a GDP growth of 7.8%. For comparison, GDP in the U.S. grew by 1.6% and in the EU by 1.5%. The prime minister said that industrial growth in Russia was the best it has been in the past 20 years, at 4.7% which puts it in fourth place in the world rankings.
We are almost the world leaders in terms of our budget deficit. The precise and prudent Germans have a 4.3% hole in their finances, whereas our budget revenues turned out to be 0.8% higher than our expenditure. Our public debt is also looking good: Europe has debts amounting to 80% of its GDP, and for the United States it's over 100%, while ours is only 10.4%.
Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov said that "in real terms we managed to reach the level of the pre-crisis years." In other words they have finally got the crisis pill they swallowed three years ago out of their system. As usual for us we have not spent all our oil revenues, the finance minister said.
"From these additional 2.5 trillion roubles (which the budget earned because of the high oil prices - Ed.) we've only spent 10%," Siluanov said, citing that as the reason why inflation had been kept down to 6.1%.
It was not all good news, however. The bad news was directed specifically at the governors: the prime minister advised them to pay close attention to utility tariffs. It was because of the utility price rises that the governor of the Kirov Region, Nikita Belykh, recently received a scolding from the prime minister.
"We are entering an election campaign and your humble servant is one of the presidential hopefuls," Putin reminded them. "I do not rule out the possibility that I may win the election. If that happens, straight after the inauguration I will make a close study of those who allowed the utility tariffs to soar. And it would be with a heavy heart, but I would be forced to make personnel changes. I stress again: there is no just cause for raising utility tariffs," the prime minister summarised.
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A propos
Military salaries to go up on 25 January
The presidium mentioned the army, which the lion's share of the budget will be spent on this year. The most important thing is where the money is going – on increased pensions and salaries for officers from January 1. Admittedly none of the soldiers had received the new salaries yet but the Defence Ministry promised that they would be in place within two weeks.
"The first payments will be made on January 25," a Defence Ministry spokesperson said.
According to her, salaries will be going up for 350,000 contract soldiers, and just to make sure that everyone was aware of their good fortune, the Defence Ministry drew up a comparison of last year's salaries and future salaries. So a platoon commander with the rank of lieutenant will receive 50,000 roubles instead of 24,000, a company commander with the rank of captain will earn 66,000 instead of 27,000, and a battalion commander with the rank of lieutenant-colonel is set to get 76,000 instead of the 30,000 he received last year.
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The opening of Vladimir Putin's election site is on page 4
Nina Kuzmina
