The lowering of the retirement age will lead to the decrease of the volume of pension contributions, Prime Minister Alikhan Smailov responded to MP Dana Nurzhigit’s inquiry regarding the retirement age of women. According to the Prime Minister, the process of raising the retirement age in connection with the increase in life expectancy is underway in both European countries and neighboring Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia and Belarus. New measures are currently being developed in Kazakhstan to improve the efficiency of the pension system. The retirement age for women in the country has been increasing by six months every year since 2018. This process will be implemented in phases over 10 years.
“Kazakh citizens receive the basic and solidarity pension from the budget. The solidarity pension is calculated in accordance with the length of service of citizens until 1998 and the income earned over the last three years. As a result, this type of payment will decrease every year, while the share of the funded pension will grow. Therefore, the reduction of the retirement age will lead to the decrease in the volume of pension contributions and a sharp reduction in payments from this system”, the Prime Minister clarified.
Smailov expressed his opinion that it would be more reasonable to keep the current multi-level pension system. According to him, over the past 10 years, the average amount of pension payments has increased tenfold, that is, from 3,000 to 30,000 tenge. As a result, pension savings amounted to 12.9 trillion tenge, and the number of individual pension accounts of active contributors reached 9,000,000 tenge. Smailov noted that the state guarantees the safety of pension savings, taking into account annual inflation.
