Tartu – In a speech given at a reception of the Mayor of Tartu celebrating the anniversary of the Republic, Prime Minister Andrus Ansip said that owing to the steadfastness and joint effort of the people, Estonia is becoming a symbol of common sense and wise management, a positive sign not only for the European Union, but the entire world.
“As a state and as a nation we have made incredible achievements over the last year," said Ansip, noting that our conservative fiscal policy and ability to quickly react in changed circumstances are awe-inspiring. "Estonia has done quite the impossible. This will be crowned by the introduction of the euro in Estonia,” said the Head of Government in his most important speech of the year.
In his speech Ansip reminded the audience that three years ago the economic growth rate was 7 percent, employment was rising and unemployment falling. “Based on common sense the Government decided to increase the reserves to an unprecedented extent. This was by far not a universally shared or the only imaginable policy at the time. To the contrary, a fleet of critics preached of how pointless it was to gather reserves in some foreign bank and that we should start new spending projects worth billions and take huge loans as a state to finance them. The Government went the other way, the way of common sense, and gathered reserves in good times,” recalled Ansip and added that the Government reformed the labour market and sickness benefits and pushed public spending into strict boundaries. “I want to thank the people of Estonia who understood us,” said Ansip.
The Head of Government reminded the audience in his speech how a year ago loud voices called for cutting pensions. “It was claimed that without cutting them it would be impossible to improve the fiscal position and that Estonia would fail. We succeeded,” assured the Prime Minister. Since 2004 the Government has managed to more than double pensions. Nevertheless, a Eurostat survey says that 39% of the population aged over 65 years live at risk of poverty in Estonia. “Is it populist to raise pensions by five percent in difficult times? In the European cultural space it is not traditional to cut pensions before one has run out of every other possible choice,” said Ansip.
According to him, this policy, in addition to ensuring stability, has another substantive reason: cutting pensions would alleviate the pressure on critically revising all public expenditure. According to Ansip, a pension cut would have saved merely 2 billion kroons, but in reality the state managed to improve its fiscal position by 19 billion kroons without touching pensions. “I seriously doubt that the labour market and sickness benefit reform would have been carried out had we cut pensions,” he said.
According to Ansip, in these difficult times we have saved and robustly developed in various fields. In spite of difficult times we have taken a long step towards becoming a Nordic society. The number of lethal traffic accidents has decreased, the crime rate has not exploded in spite of the crisis, and the living standard has been stable. The Prime Minister finds that in comparison with previous years there is more affection and less upstart egoism. "And why? The main reason is the common sense of our people,” said Prime Minister Andrus Ansip in the anniversary speech.
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