The rapid growth of Russians’ confidence in their own level of financial literacy is alarming. This was stated at the Gaidar Forum on January 13 by Deputy Minister of Finance of Russia Mikhail Kotyukov, commenting on the results of a recent study by the NAFI analytical center, according to which 58% of respondents highly appreciated their own knowledge – three times more than 10 years ago.
“The fact that in Russia the number of citizens who are confident in their level of financial literacy has tripled cannot but be alarming. When a person says “I know everything, I can do everything and will do exactly as I see fit,” this also requires very close attention, ”said the Deputy Finance Minister.
He stressed that when making financial decisions, you need to “measure seven times and cut once, and not in such a way that I will now quickly make a decision, earn a lot and not lose anything.”
According to him, financial culture should be an integral part of the life of every Russian family, and instilling it is the task of the state, for the solution of which constant work is being done.
Last year, 85 regional programs for the development of financial literacy were formed, covering all regions of Russia.
Kotyukov’s interlocutor is the dean of the Faculty of Economics of Moscow State University (MGU) named after M.V. M.V. Lomonosov, Alexander Auzan called one of the key tasks at the current stage to instill in citizens a culture of risk, without which, entering the stock market, they will expect guaranteed returns, like from bank deposits, but higher than from deposits.
“We first put our fellow citizens through a phase of risk protection as financial children who are not able to deal with these risks,” Auzan said.
Now there are other challenges, because to distribute investment accounts, people need to be trained to “permanently live with risk, and not the risk that the state is ready to take on,” he added.
Dean believes that a society avoiding uncertainty will be deprived of developed venture markets and innovative technologies. Therefore, it is necessary to educate, among other things, a “culture of failures”.
“The winner is not the one who collected something in his garage at the age of 20 and became a billionaire, but the one who had 15 projects burned out by the age of 40 and only after that something happened,” he summed up.
According to a survey by SberLife Insurance and SberNPF (available to Izvestia), published in September 2021, every second Russian (51%) considers himself financially literate. At the same time, 11% said that they are carriers of absolute knowledge in this area: these are mainly respondents with higher financial or economic education, people with a high level of income, as well as representatives of the 30–40 age group. Men reported absolute literacy twice as often as women.
Source: IZ
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
