First and foremost, unfortunately, even after 23 years of independence, we find ourselves in a situation in which we are still feeling the Soviet bureaucracy working in Ukraine. We saw that the procedures and rules we were functioning by were not transparent enough. We saw that, unfortunately, corruption was still part of the practice in a lot of areas. Therefore, first and foremost, for progress we're using macro-financial numbers. Unfortunately, they are not immediately translating into the well-being of people. We had a huge recession in 2014 and 2015. Only at the end of 2016 did we manage to have small growth— 2.3%—in our GDP.
We're also using numbers based on the specific reforms we are introducing. For example, we have introduced an absolutely unique electronic procurement system, called ProZorro, in Ukraine. We can already see, from only one year of its implementation, that we have preserved about 10% of the money foreseen in the budget for public procurement. This means that we have closed the loop of corruption in so many cases. Right now we've introduced transparent rules of public procurement.
This is a very serious and quantitative measure. We are still working on improvement of this system, but finally it has become obligatory for everybody. We had a lot of resistance in different spheres. People did not want to use this, and they were finding different pretexts not to use it, but we were clear in our political will to continue on this.
That is about every single sphere. Even in this dire economic situation, and with the necessity to pay more than 5% of our GDP to defence and security every single year, I think we have managed to raise the minimum salary for Ukrainian citizens. I think it is a very clear quantitative and qualitative measure such that, even in the most difficult economic situation, we are ensuring that people are better socially protected.
Moreover, since the beginning of 2017 we've started raising salaries for teachers and for medics. We just passed pension reform. It was a huge endeavour undertaken by the Ukrainian government. Thank God, supported by the work we all did and by Parliament, we passed pension reform that, first, increases and makes more just the pensions our people receive; and second, includes a plan around how we will ensure that the pension fund, which right now has a 50% deficit, will not have this deficit in the years to come.