Belarus Plans To Raise Retirement Age To 65

The law increasing the retirement age is already prepared, said the head of the analytical project Belarus Security Blog Andrei Parotnikau.

The expert said so during the discussion in the Belarusian House in Warsaw, Radio Racyja informs.

– Recently some reforms are talked about. However, during his new so-called “inauguration” Lukashenka said that he won’t be forced to make any reforms. To your mind, what scenarios for Belarus exist at the moment?

– The scenario is very simple – either there would be money in the budget or not. If the budget is to have problems with money, everything that is not critical for the regime is to be axed in the first place. It is a social sphere. That is why, unfortunately, I do not exclude that this project, “a social state”, is to be rolled back very rapidly. At least, as far as I know, the entire corpus of laws and regulations on raising the retirement age to 65 years for everyone, has already been drafted. Even though the average life span in our country is about 70 years.

– What other changes that may affect lives of ordinary Belarusians are possible in the coming years?

– I think this is definitely the housing and utility sector, because it is a massive sector that takes up a lot of money. This is the sphere of higher education, that is the reduction of state-funded places, and the growth of for-profit education services. And without doubt, that is the health care, where they have more and more paid services in fact.

We remind that women in Belarus retire at 55, men – at 60. There are more than 2.5 million pensioners (27% of the population) in the country now, and 644,000 of them continue working. In September the average old-age pension amounted to slightly more than Br2.9 million.

Authorities have repeatedly spoken in favor of increasing the retirement age for the Belarusians.