MOSCOW, November 23 (Itar-Tass) — Plans for the social development of the country that are being made public by the President and the Prime Minister are no election-campaign rhetoric and they are of systemic long-term nature, head of the Kremlin administration Sergei Naryshkin said in an interview published in Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Wednesday.
"The attention of the State to matters concerning the social development of the country is not of election-campaign character eithr but is a priority which, I am sure, will be maintained subsequently as well," he said.
"Throughout the past decade the President and the Government made decisions in the interests of developing, first of all, the social welfare sector, for the benefit of less-protected sections of the population: pensioners, veterans, children, families with many children, and so on," the presidential administration chief recalled.
Naryshkin pointed out that social directionality would also keep on in the event of contraction of oil and gas revenue, in particular. "I believe that a decline in oil prices if they are not out-of-limit, will not become critical for the Russian economy," he said.
"The government and other bodies of authority have already learned to function effectively under conditions of recessional phenomena: the world economic downturn of 2008-2009 showed that we are quite capable of drawing up and implementing such an anti-recession program that would make it possible to get out of any situation with the least outlay," Naryshkin emphasized.