Pension Fund Deficit Is One of Ukraine's Main Problems

December 06, 2017

Talking about stability according to financial stability criteria, Ukraine's pension system can hardly be called that. Despite the fact that pension financing expenditures make up most of the social security spending — about 65% of the total, the level of our citizens' pensions remains among the lowest in Europe. According to both, domestic and foreign experts, one of Ukraine's main problems is pension fund deficit.

In the past years, pension fund deficit has been continuously growing. We have researched that this problem is typical not only for Ukraine. In proportional comparison, pension provision expenditures in EU countries, and the countries of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Europe, are comparable to ours.

The problem was artificially generated to some extent, when the unified social security contribution was reduced last year. This is not news for anyone, and this government step has had ambiguous reaction. We remember very well the lobbying by representatives of small, medium and large businesses for this initiative, and from the business perspective this move must have looked acceptable. However, from the point of view of broad expert community that includes domestic and foreign experts, this move was ill-conceived and voluntarist, to say the least, and caused the growing pension system deficit.


Olga Pyshchulina

Leading Expert, Social and Gender Programmes


Born in 1966 in Kharkiv

Education:

School of Economics at the Kharkiv State (National) University (Kharkiv, Ukraine) (1989)

Summer Course on Human Rights, School of Human Rights Research, Faculty of Law, Utrecht University, The Netherlands (2001)

PhD in sociology (Candidate of Social Science) (1997), Honorable Economics of Ukraine (2012). I am an author more than 90 publishing and a Civil Servant of 3rd rank

Research Interests:

Structural deformation of the economic and social policy; Main problems with the national models of social policy implementation; The issue of income polarization; Ineffectiveness of state transfer policy; Failure of pension reform in Ukraine; Social protection programmers in Ukraine; Regulations of labour market; Gender issues

Experience as a civil servant in the Government’s employ:

Civil Servant of 3d rank. Total experience 12 years. The Head of Social Policy Department (since 2010), Principal Consultant of the Civil Society and Social Relationships Department (since 2003) National Institute for Strategic Studies

Experience as a Research Fellow:

Senior Researcher (1995–2001) , Researcher (1989–1995) School of Sociology, Karazin Kharkiv National University, School of Sociology (1997–2003)

Teaching Experience:

Associate Professor, School of Sociology, Karazin Kharkiv National University, School of Sociology (1997–2003)

(044) 201-11-98

 pyshchulina@razumkov.org.ua