Context: On December 18, 2025, the All-Belarusian People’s Congress met in Minsk. More than 1,000 delegates gathered to unanimously approve the country’s socioeconomic development program for the next five-year period.
Of his two-hour address to the nation, Alexander Lukashenko devoted only about 10 minutes to summing up how the outgoing program had been carried out. In particular, he boasted of the country’s success in preserving and expanding industrial output: “In the global industrial competitiveness ranking, we hold 56th place among roughly 150 countries.”
According to the latest available data, for 2023, Belarus does in fact rank 56th in this index. However, Lukashenko failed to mention that this is one of the country’s worst results in at least 20 years, only slightly better than the record low of 2022, when Belarus ranked 58th. Before that, Belarus was among the top 50 countries in terms of industrial competitiveness.
A similar trend can be seen in some other international rankings as well. For example, in the global ranking of progress toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, Belarus is in 32nd place. At the start of the last five-year plan, in 2020, Belarus ranked 18th out of 166 countries.
A report on development results from 2016 to 2020 stated that Belarus ranked 59th out of 93 countries worldwide in terms of health care development. Now the country has dropped 30 places in that same ranking.
Several more excerpts from rankings and references to global benchmarks that Alexander Lukashenko left unmentioned appear in Belarus’ socioeconomic development program through 2030. The document states that “thanks to its social policies, Belarus has maintained its place among countries with a very high level of human development, ranking 65th out of 193 in the Human Development Index.”
According to 2023 data, Belarus does indeed rank 65th. Yet 65th place is a sign of decline, not stability: in 2021 the country ranked 60th, and since 2015 it has slid 10 places.
“The trend in pension payments remains stable. The ratio of the average old-age pension to the average wage in the economy fluctuates between 36% and 37%, which is as close as possible to the global standard,” the program states.
Compared with Russia, that figure is indeed not bad: there, pensions amount to only about a quarter of the average wage. But compared to European Union countries, Belarus lags behind: the average level there is 60%. In Spain and Greece it tops 80%, while a ratio similar to Belarus’ is found only in Lithuania and Croatia.
