Children’s allowances and allowances for mothers, indexed to the inflation rate
The independent MP Oana Bîzgan and the USR senator, Adrian Wiener, initiated a project to supplement Law no. 76/2002. The project concerns the unemployment insurance system and the stimulation of employment, so that the Social Reference Index (SSI) is indexed annually with 100% of the inflation rate.
The Social Insurance System represents the strongest institutional expression of solidarity. This is a means of ensuring a minimum standard of living for many citizens of Romania. The Social Reference Indicator (SRI) is a unitary calculation method by which all social benefits (minimum guaranteed income, unemployment benefits, heating aid, state allowance for children, etc.) relate to a certain value.
Today, the value of the SRI is 500 lei and has not changed since 2008
“Today, the value of the SRI is 500 lei and has not changed since 2008, when it was last established by the emergency ordinance,” says the initiator of the project, the independent MP Oana Bîzgan. The indexations that occurred were, according to a report of the European Network of Social Policies, “arbitrary and following a political logic”.
“The purpose of social benefits is to guarantee access to the daily basket of goods, acting as a tool in the fight against poverty. If its indexation is done arbitrarily, by increasing the fraction of the SRI and not by increasing the value of the SRI, every time in an election year it is clear that the social benefit will achieve its goal to a very small extent, ” Oana Bîzgan emphasizes.
These issues will change with the amendment of the legislation, through the annual indexation of the SRI with 100% of the inflation rate, to reflect the average annual increase in prices, supporters say. This indexing model is not a novelty, being already used in the case of pensions (Law 263/2010). Inflation rate is the most reliable instrument for quantifying price changes, a neutral economic indicator that allows the minimum social standards to be ensured, regardless of short-term criteria, including political and electoral.
The elimination of “the arbitrary” from the method of indexing the SRI will bring social and economic stability, by predicting the necessary budget and the social effects produced by its application. At the same time, the automatic indexing of the SRI eliminates any slippage, those sudden increases that can cause budgetary imbalances, which are also shown in the motivation of the project submitted to the Senate.
The total number of social benefits affected by SRI indexing is about 6,630,000
According to the data of the Ministry of Labor and Social Justice, for the first semester of this year, the total number of social benefits affected by the indexation of the SRI is about 6,630,000. This is not the number of assisted persons, as the same beneficiary can receive more benefits: for example, a mother is entitled to the childcare allowance, the related social insurance contribution and possibly the heating aid. More than half of the total social benefits – about 3 700,000 – constitute the state allowances for children. Those incorrectly called “social assisted”, i.e. the beneficiaries of social assistance to ensure the minimum guaranteed income, are about 250,000 – less than 4% of the total social benefits.
Of the EU member states, Romania allocates one of the lowest percentages of GDP for social assistance expenditures.
The legislative proposal was signed by more than 60 parliamentarians from both in power and the opposition. It is the third trans-party project initiated by Oana Bîzgan, the most recent one providing for the punishment of harassment in the public space (including the street s), which is still unregulated in Romania.