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.
