The state freezes all social standards: every UAH 100 increase in the minimum wage would cost the budget UAH 5 billion
3 October 2024 08:54
Social standards remain unchanged in the draft State Budget of Ukraine for 2025 due to limited resources. Roksolana Pidlasa, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada’s Budget Committee, told this in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine, according to "Komersant Ukrainian"
“The Ministry of Finance estimates that if the minimum wage is increased by UAH 100 this year, state budget expenditures will increase by UAH 5.3 billion. That is, if the minimum wage is increased by, for example, UAH 1,000 to UAH 9,000, it will be more than UAH 50 billion of budget expenditures,”
– said the MP.
The state currently does not have such funds. The head of the Budget Committee also drew attention to the problems associated with the concept of the subsistence minimum. It will not be raised either. The MP generally believes that this category should be abandoned in budget calculations, as it creates a negative attitude towards the state.
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“It causes a lot of negative attitudes towards the state when we say in an official document, in the state budget, that a person should be able to live on UAH 3,000, while the Ministry of Social Policy on the next street calculates the actual, real subsistence level at around UAH 9,000,”
– says Pidlasa.
Instead, she proposes to introduce a basic calculation value to which the salaries of judges, prosecutors, anti-corruption officials and other civil servants will be tied.
Regarding the possibility of revising social standards, Pidlasa noted that this is only possible if the GDP forecast for the first half of 2025 is exceeded. Currently, the real GDP growth forecast for 2025 is 2.7%.
In total, the draft state budget for 2025 provides UAH 420.683 billion to finance the Ministry of Social Policy, which is significantly less than the UAH 469.73 billion allocated in the current year’s budget.
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