On 17 September, the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov signed Decree "On the measures to strengthen social support for pensioners".

Since the first days of independence of Uzbekistan the most priority task is the pursuance of strong social policy aimed at consecutive and purposeful rise of living standards and welfare of the population, ensuring address social protection of the most vulnerable groups – pensioners, disabled and single old people.

The high rates of economic growth, low inflation, achieved over the past years, create a solid basis for successful implement of these large-scale social tasks.

President Karimov has set a strategically important task – to ensure every three years the increase of incomes and wages of the population at the average of 2-2.5 times in order to reach the level of the countries that maintain the high level of welfare for their population.

The care for pensioners, improving the conditions and quality of their life play key role in the system of increase of living standards of the population. The legislative base and mechanisms of pension system of the Republic of Uzbekistan are constantly being improved. The limiting of time record taken to calculate pension was abolished in the country in 2002, and a new additional mechanism of pension system based on the principles of individual accumulation of pension funds in the accumulative accounts of the citizens was introduced in 2005.

The decree is an important stage of implementing specific tasks on providing with the further rise of pension – the main source of incomes of nearly 3 million citizens of Uzbekistan who reached the retirement age.

The important feature of this decree, taking effect on 1 October 2007, is that the rise of pension will be provided due to increase of the limit sizes of incomes used to calculate pension from the sevenfold to eightfold size of the minimum wages. The matter is that the average monthly wages has been growing more rapidly than the minimum wage in the recent years, and the share of workers with higher income is growing among the people who reached the age of retirement.

The introduction of this norm starting form 1 October this year allows to increase the sizes of pensions for the major part of pensioners who received relatively high wages before retirement, raise their welfare standards, strengthen the principles of social justice, increase their motivation to the high paid job, population’s most active involvement in the development and reform of the country’s economy.

It is worthy to note that the new presidential decree applies not only to the citizens who will be retired after 1 October 2007, but first of all to those who are already retired now.

The implementation of the measures stipulated by the Decree of the President of Uzbekistan "On the measures to strengthen social support for pensioners" will be financed from the sources of off-budget Pension Fund, and the State Budget if needed. More than 20 billion soums will be allocated in 2007, and over 100 billion sums in 2008.