The personalities from the field of arts who turned 60 will get a monthly merit allowance. It will be equal to an average official salary and will not be taxed. A bill to this effect proposed by the MPs of the government coalition was adopted in the first reading on May 16, IPN reports.

MP Ghenadie Ciobanu said the allowance will be paid from the state budget for life. “Regretfully, the social changes of the last two decades affected first of all the culture and the people of art. The intellectuals and the people of culture are marginalized and live under the subsistence level, without state social protection,” he stated. According to him, most of these people receive low pensions and salaries on which they cannot buy even bare essentials.

The merit allowance will be provided for special accomplishments and in gratitude for impressive work in the fields of music, performing arts, filmmaking, literature, plastic arts, theater, architecture, and the mobile and immobile cultural heritage.

The proposals for providing merit allowances will be submitted annually by the Ministry of Culture to a competent national commission.

The commission will consist of the head of the parliamentary commission on culture, education, youth, and sport, the head of the commission on social protection, the minister of finance, the minister of culture, the president of the Union of Plastic Artists, the president of the Union of Composers and Musicologists, and other persons. It will decide who will benefit from such allowances.