Maternal capital decreased in recipients – Newspaper Kommersant No. 158 (7359) of 08/30/2022

For the first half of 2022, the expenses of the Pension Fund of Russia (PFR) on the maternity capital program decreased by 3.2 billion rubles, to 191.5 billion rubles, the Accounts Chamber indicated. This happened because, despite the increase in the size of the payment, the number of its recipients decreased by 12.6%. This, in turn, is due to a decrease in the birth rate, to support which, at one time, the program for the issuance of mother capital was launched.

For the first half of 2022, the number of recipients of maternity capital decreased by 12.6% and amounted to 517 thousand people, the auditors of the Accounts Chamber concluded after analyzing the statements of the Pension Fund, which is the administrator of these payments.

Recall that initially women who gave birth (adopted) more than one child could receive mother capital, but since 2020 they began to give it for the first-born. Now the amount of the payment, which is indexed annually, for those who gave birth to the first child is 524.5 thousand rubles, the second (if the mother’s capital is paid for the first time) – 693.1 thousand rubles. The main ways of using the funds are: paying off a mortgage, paying for a child’s education, or forming a funded part of a mother’s labor pension. As follows from the PFR data, 12.3 million families have benefited from the program during the program.

In the first half of 2022, the Auditors of the Accounts Chamber calculated that the PFR spent 191.5 billion rubles on such payments, which is 3.2 billion rubles. less than the expenses of the same period in 2021. In total, 443 billion rubles are provided for the implementation of the program in the annual budget of the fund. This year, the amount of payments under the program increased by 8.4%, so the recorded decrease is due to a decrease in the number of certificate recipients. It, in turn, could occur due to a decrease in the birth rate in the country.

Recall that the risks of population decline in the Russian Federation have been discussed in the government since the mid-2000s – and initially the maternity capital program was considered as one of the main tools to prevent it. Disputes about its effectiveness, however, continue to this day. The most reliable method for determining the impact of measures on the number of births in demography is considered to be the analysis of real generations, however, since this is possible only after decades have passed since the start of pronatalist policy measures, in most cases, studies are carried out on “conditional generations”, based on a set of simultaneously living people of all ages (for example, women aged 15-49 in 2020).

Their results cannot be completely “cleared” from the influence of the economic, social, cultural and political situation and, therefore, it is absolutely reliable to establish causal relationships between state policy measures and the reaction of the population to them. But even the work done in this way testifies to the influence of the mother capital program on the birth calendar, and not on the final number of children a woman wants to have (for more details, see Kommersant-Online). This conclusion of the researchers explains why in the first years after the start of issuing certificates, the number of births grew, and in recent years it began to decline. So, in the first six months of 2022, the birth rate decreased in annual terms by 6.3%, according to Rosstat data.

Anastasia Manuylova