В Атырау
-5 
The National Bank of Kazakhstan did not call for raising of the retirement age for women, the bank’s vice-chairman Bissengali Tadzhiyakov told Diapazon newspaper.
“The National Bank did not call for that. Marchenko expressed his opinion as a citizen and consultant. The National Bank is a body that is responsible for the financial stability, regulating tenge rate and inflation level. The rest is the government’s authority,” Tadzhiyakov said.
According to him, raising the retirement age for women was in the concept of the reform of 1998 but it has never been discussed during all these years for some reasons. “There are currently 9 national pension funds in the country. They have accumulated 3.2 trillion tenge ($21 billion). The pension money is mainly invested in government securities and their investment profit is very low. Economically active population in Kazakhstan makes 8 million people. But only half of them are making pension payments. The rest of them are hiding their profits and receiving their salaries in envelopes. The state is paying pensions to those who do not have enough pension savings. But in time people will be getting pensions only from their savings. That’s why the huge amounts of money are now allocated for the employment program,” Tadzhiyakov stated.
The budget has enough money to pay the pensions if the retirement age is raised in 2018, he said. The monthly amount of pension savings received by pension funds is 42-45 billion tenge ($280-300 million), while the annual savings stand at around 600 billion tenge ($4 billion). “This amount will not go down. The average salary was 80 thousand tenge ($533). It is now 100 thousand ($733). The economy is developing. Real estate prices are dropping in other countries because of the crisis, while they are going up in our country and the demand is not going down,” Tadzhiyakov added.