- We've got a lot of questions about national projects. There's another detail. As I understand, these problems should be solved by national projects. Everyone talks about them. Officials at all levels talk about national projects. But judging by the questions we get, people seem not to quite understand what national projects are, what they'll lead to, and if there'll be any use of them.
Vladimir Putin: "Yes, of course. If you'd like to begin with this, I am grateful to you for this because this is what all of our work is dedicated today. In fact, the work revolves around people, but to achieve the best results for our people, for our citizens, for the development of the economy, we organized our work within the framework of these so-called national projects. The ultimate goal of them is to put the economy on a new track, make it high-tech, and improve labor productivity, and on the basis of this, improve living standards of our citizens, ensuring the long-term security of our state. That's why we divided all these areas not according to their importance, but according to the order of implementation in terms of the distribution of resources.
We did considerable work. First of all, we needed to understand how we would attain the result, where to find the funds for the measures the state is supposed to take. Unfortunately, the government went for the increase in the VAT from 18% to 20%. I reiterate that it was done to provide money to the state budget, make the first steps a state should make. This is the development of infrastructure, for example. Who will build railroads, bridges, or highways, electricity lines, and so on? This, as well as some other structural jobs, can't be done without the state's help. Then, we took the decision, calculated how much is necessary to ensure a boost in the development of some industries and bring people's incomes to a new level. I reiterate that, unfortunately, we had to go for these unpleasant measures. But originally, we expected that it can and will lead to relatively negative effects for a very short period of time. Overall, the government and the central bank turned out to be right.
Unfortunately, inflation increased for a period of six months. What does this "inflation increase" mean? It means that the central bank raised the key interest rate, it means that production fell a little, and so on. We now see that production is on the rise, that inflation, according to the latest data that we got the day before yesterday, if I'm not mistaken, fell below 5%. And incomes began, we'll discuss it in detail later. But incomes began to restore. Therefore, at least so far, what we expected and how we planned to organize our work is effective".
