The 47th session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia has passed the Union State budget for 2015 in the second reading, BelTA has learned. The budget is close to RUB4.9 billion.

The Supreme State Council's draft executive order on the year 2015 budget of the Union State was submitted to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union of Belarus and Russia on 10 November 2014. In line with the document the member states are expected to contribute a total of RUB4.872 billion to the budget, including RUB3.167 billion by Russia and RUB1.705 billion by Belarus.

In 2015 the Belarus-Russia Union State budget is supposed to spend about 85% of the total expenses on nine union programs and 28 projects. As much as 42% of the budget will be spent in the areas of the production sector, agriculture, power engineering, transport, communications and informatics. As much as 26% will be spent on social policy, healthcare, education, ecology, culture and mass media. The Union State budget will spend 17% on military and technical cooperation, law enforcement, security. Less than 10% of the total expenses will be channeled into the operation of Union State agencies, said Grigory Rapota, State Secretary of the Union State of Belarus and Russia.

The nine Union State programs will focus on the development of space and ground means to provide remote earth sensing data using high technologies to consumers in Russia and Belarus (the funding for 2015 has been set at RUB642 million), innovative development of potato and artichoke production in 2013-2016 (RUB560 million), enhancement of the border security of the Union State in 2012-2016 (nearly RUB805 million), improvement of the system to protect common information resources of Belarus and Russia using high technologies (RUB43 million), joint efforts to overcome consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe within the framework of the Union State till 2016 (over RUB328 million).

Apart from that, a new Union State program has been put together for the sake of researching and developing high-performance information and computing technologies for increasing and effectively using the resource potential of hydrocarbon raw materials of the Union State. The next year's funding of the program will be RUB100 million.


 

BelTA