Vladimir Putin's opening address:

Good afternoon, colleagues.

I would like to start today's work by congratulating the Ministry of Finance. On this day, in 1802, the Ministry of Finance was established in Russia, following the decree of Emperor Alexander I. I congratulate the minister, all our colleagues from the Ministry of Finance and all financial experts on this event, on this holiday, which is almost a professional holiday for Russian financial experts.

We are going to discuss the forecast for Russia's social and economic development from 2011 to 2013 at this regular meeting of the Commission on Budgetary Planning. This forecast must become the basis for the country's future budget.

We are proceeding from the fact that in 2011 the gross domestic product (GDP) will grow by over 4%, investments will grow by 10% and real incomes of the population will grow on average by 3.6%.

In 2011, we will continue keeping tariffs down to take the financial load off the people and the businesses and support a more active economic recovery. In general, this policy should be stricter than in 2010.

We also decided to delegate the power to set tariffs and regulate the consumption of utilities to regional authorities. As you remember, these functions used to be performed by local government entities, municipalities, following previously taken decisions. I hope that the transfer of these issues to a higher, regional level will make it possible to avoid the mishaps we faced at the beginning of this year, when municipal authorities raised tariffs, primarily housing and utilities tares, arbitrarily, without any economically substantiated reason.

We hope that next year we won't have to settle problems on the site with local authorities that make such errors.
As I already said, in 2011, we are going to reform the budget in order to use it more reasonably and effectively. Instead of spending budget resources on a variety of minor projects, we should focus on solving the most important issues in education, healthcare, housing and social policy, national defence and security and other areas of responsibility for the state.

There are plans to distribute budget expenses among corresponding state programmes and establish methods of measuring efficiency and responsibility for the results achieved for specific agencies.

We will also examine the list of state programmes today. The key is to get a well-structured and regulated system of priorities for the budget policy.

In addition, we will also consider a number of issues regarding particular items of budget expenditure.

Following our discussions, we will consider the draft budget at the September 23 government meeting and then submit it to parliament, to the State Duma.

Let's proceed with the discussion.