23 April 2004 17:51
Russian premier says it is time to offer realistic social package to society
[Presenter] The government is set to halve the number of the poor in Russia in the next three years. This plan was
announced by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov at a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He met representatives
of small and medium business. According to sociologists, 30m citizens in Russia, in other words one in five, live below
the poverty line. Aleksandr Ruvinskiy has the details.
[Correspondent] The government chairman had his first meeting with business representatives not so long ago at the
Union of [Industrialists and] Entrepreneurs at which mainly big companies were represented. Today there was a wider
audience, mainly small- and medium-size enterprises. It is by their efforts that the task of doubling Gross Domestic
Product is to be achieved.
In his speech, the chairman of the government, Mikhail Fradkov, said he had a desire to communicate with
entrepreneurs through dialogue more often. And the aim is to ensure qualitative changes in the economy. This is the
government's intention. We can miss an opportunity to revise our actions, and the trends of the first quarter
revealed some problems.
Mikhail Fradkov set the task of moving to orientated management on the basis of chosen priorities aimed at increasing
competitiveness. Speaking about the responsibility of the government for social policy, Mikhail Fradkov said:
[Fradkov] In our view, the time has come to offer society, instead of promises of, by definition, unpopular reform in
the social sphere, a concrete and realistic social package, including the most important social services in the housing,
education and health spheres. The key thing here is that the package should be acceptable to both the population and
business, as well as the state.
[Corespondent] One should get away from a rigid differentiation of incomes. Changing taxation in the raw-material
sphere will make it possible to partly solve this problem. But the main way, according to Fradkov, is increasing
productivity. Speaking about tax policy, Mikhail Fradkov stressed that the government did not intend to change the
income tax rate. For the time being it is proposed to focus on improving the single social tax.
[Radio Mayak] |
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