Early retirement possible with enough savings: Kazakhstan Minister

Kazakhstan Minister of Labor and Social Protection Serik Abdenov has announced that early retirement is possible if savings are sufficient, Tengrinews.kz reports. "Early retirement remains in the draft law. It becomes possible after the level of savings sufficient for retirement annuity is achieved. The early retirement age is 50 years for women and 55 for men. In case of enough savings women can retire early. The current savings threshold is 3.1 million tenge ($20.7 thousand) for women and 2.8 million tenge ($18.7 thousand) for men. The difference is related to the fact that men retire 5 years later than women. This threshold is reviewed annually," Serik Abdenov said. According to the Minister, the draft law had been approved and submitted to the Majilis. He also added that there are currently 137 thousand retired women in Kazakhstan who are working in spite of being retired. "286 thousand women are unemployed in Kazakhstan; 7.5 percent of women over 50 are unemployed. The government will also continue pursuing the Employment-2020 program. Moreover, we are making changes in the program to improve its efficiency. We have defined a certain number of jobs required until 2020. We will also tap into monitoring the created jobs via an employment map. According to our calculations, we need 508 thousand jobs by 2020 to retain unemployment at the level of 5 percent," the Minister said. By Baubek Konyrov