Introducing New Family Support Benefits in Russia: an Estimate of Public Expenditures

Yelena Andreeva, Dmitry Bychkov and Olesya Feoktistova

Finansovyj žhurnal — Financial Journal, 2018, issue 2, 36-46

Abstract: In spite of the improvements in the demographic situation in Russia that have occurred in the 2000s and that have been triggered, among other things, due to the introduction of a number of new family support benefits and increasing amounts of the existing ones, the amount of family support benefits as percent of the GDP in Russia remains lower than it is in most European countries. The efficiency of such benefits as a policy method to increase the birth rate remains questionable as well. The paper presents an attempt to estimate the amount of federal government expenditures that will be required to fund new mean-tested family allowances introduced in Russia in the beginning of 2018 — the monthly allowance upon the birth of a first and/or a second child, and to estimate the effects of these allowances upon the poverty headcount and the income gap in Russia. The authors conclude that a clearer definition of the social policy goal, such as increasing the human capital of the new generation rather than increasing the birth rate, and finer tuning of benefit parameters, which would require harmonization of eligibility criteria for different family support measures and universal applicability of federal family support measures, disregarding the region of family’s residence, could increase the efficiency of these benefits as a poverty prevention tool and provide more universal and transparent social support to families.

Keywords: state social expenditures; social benefits; social transfers and entitlements; support of families with children; policies to support the birth rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 H75 I38 I39 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nifi.ru/images/FILES/Journal/Archive/20 ... 8_2/fm_2018_2_03.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fru:finjrn:180203:p:36-46

DOI: 10.31107/2075-1990-2018-2-36-46

Access Statistics for this article

Finansovyj žhurnal — Financial Journal is currently edited by Vladimir S. Nazarov

More articles in Finansovyj žhurnal — Financial Journal from Financial Research Institute, Moscow 125375, Russia Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gennady Ageev ().