Transcript of the beginning of the meeting:

Ladies and gentlemen,

We will be working on the draft federal budget.

The Government Presidium held a meeting today and made a crucial decision regarding the budgeting-it approved the Guidelines for the Forecasts of National Social and Economic Development for 2010-2012. These are the indices on which the budget draft will be based.

We regard the next three years as a transition from the peak of the crisis to a return of sustainable development and diversification of the national economy. It is hard to say just when the crisis will end-but even today, we see positive trends in some economic sectors, though these trends are small. We also see some positive results from the Government anti-crisis programme. So we have every reason to expect economic improvement in 2010.

Improvement or at least stabilisation of a majority of key economic indices is our goal. First of all, GDP must resume its growth-even if slowly at first. There is another vital goal, which directly concerns our population. That is the preservation of the present living standards, the creation of new jobs, and the fight against poverty.

We should not forget the promotion of economic competition, either. We will also do everything we can to ensure an increase in production efficiency, to save energy, to increase high-tech production, and to use this opportunity to emerge from the crisis with a modernised economy.

The social and economic forecast proceeds from all those points, and the future budget must provide the tools to deal with these problems.

The forecast must certainly be realistic. We cannot hope for the global economy to revive in one big step. We should also not overestimate the likelihood that prices for traditional Russian exports will skyrocket.

We will now analyse the forecast of tax revenues and approaches to the organisation of basic federal budget indices for 2009 and the years to come.

Let's get to work.