Developing Targeted Social Assistance in Russia and Georgia: 20 Years of Reform

The article analyzes the results of 20 years of reforming national systems of targeted social support in the Russian Federation and Georgia. The experience of Georgia, along with several other countries, has already been considered by authors in articles devoted to issues of reforming the categorical system of social support and the introduction of a universal poverty benefit. This experience was taken into account when developing directions and tools for social support in the Russian Federation. This article focuses on the results of the social support reforms, primarily in terms of reducing poverty and assessing the risks associated with poverty in these two countries. Statistics show that Georgia, which began the transition to universal targeted social benefits in 2005, has made significant progress in reducing the official poverty line through regular improvements to means assessment methods and increases in the amount of social benefits. In this case, you should have in considering that the subsistence minimum used in Georgia is significantly lower than in Russia, while the proportion of the population that was below the poverty line at the beginning of the reforms, on the contrary, was noticeably higher. In addition, as shown by the results of international studies applied in Georgia, means-testing methods are far from always effective, as they leave up to a third of households below the poverty line without social benefits. Russia, however, during the course of its reforms, retained the basic framework of categorical measures, concentrating on increasing government spending on them in line with economic growth, and introduced a number of new measures as part of the implementation of an active pronatalist policy. In Russia, the problem of reducing the income deficit and poverty level of families with children and able-bodied adults who are unemployed for valid reasons and whose labor potential cannot be activated through social assistance based on a social contract remains unresolved within the framework of targeted social support.