Raising the retirement age is inevitable, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said at this weekend’s economic forum in St. Petersburg. He did not elaborate on when exactly or by how much.
The retirement age in Russia is lower than in other countries: Women retire at age 55 and men at 60. Employees in more than 20 professions retire early, including miners, loggers, pilots, rescuers and astronauts. Taking into account these privileges, the average age for becoming a pensioner is 54 for men and 52 for women. According to the Center for Demography and Human Ecology of the Institute of Economic Forecasting at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the actual life expectancy for men is now 58.8 years and for women 72.1 years.
Russia currently pays pensions out of the payments of working people, of whom there are almost twice more than senior citizens — 70 million to 36 million — but the situation is changing, and in 2031 their numbers will be equal, says Anton Drozdov, chairman of the Russian Pension Fund.
Raising the retirement age, however, still does not solve the problem of the fund’s deficit, said Drozdov. It has been calculated that raising the retirement age would provide another 40 billion rubles ($1.3 billion) to 90 billion rubles. This is not enough: After all, the budget of the RPF is more than 4 trillion rubles.
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