More than 3 million people work in small and medium-sized businesses

The Government of Kazakhstan pays great attention for many years to sustainable development of business as segment of the economy. A variety of business support programs is developed, gradually decrease the administrative barriers. According to experts of the National Chamber of Entrepreneurs "Atameken", this work has already brought a positive result.

"A few years ago the head of state said that by 2050, we need to bring the share of SME in GDP to 50%, - reminded at a briefing at the Service of central communications the deputy chairman of NCE RK "Atameken" Nurzhan Altaev. – Back then it looked fantastic and it seemed that this figure is probably unattainable. If in 2006 the share of small and medium-sized businesses was 9.8%, at the end of 2015, it reached a figure of 25.6%".

Over the past decade the trend in business development is characterized as stable and positive: the number of active employees of small and medium business increased by 206%, the number of employed in small and medium business increased by 168%. SME output index rose to 1027% in 10, labor productivity increased by 614%. The number of active SMEs is 1.2 million. Small business became a key employer. At the end of 2015 more than 3 million people work in the SMEs.

As it was noted by the deputy chairman of NCE "Atameken" Tulemis Shotanov, now in the country is set up the necessary infrastructure for business development. So, there are business support centers in each district (in total there are 188 districts in Kazakhstan), where every novice businessman can get all the necessary information.

"What does a businessman need? The businessman needs information, education and counseling, he needs funding, and most importantly - sales market - explains Mr. Shotanov. - In this regard, NCE tries to provide a full service package, to provide all the tools. (...) We can create a unique environment, we can register a company in 15 minutes, we can remove all administrative obstacles, but if we have nowhere to sell our products, our business will elementary stop".

NCE "Atameken" analyzed and identified the three most promising sales markets - China, Russia, Iran. "These are markets with a high density and population, and for us it is a priority. In this respect, we have a subsidiary – The Chamber of Commerce of Kazakhstan, that helps our entrepreneurs to enter foreign markets. And moreover, we must not forget about 17 million population - the domestic market, and here entrepreneurs must first receive information", - says Mr. Shotanov.

Budding entrepreneurs often have trouble with receipt of information. Therefore, at NCE was developed the concept "Government for Business", one of the sections of which provides the establishment of special manuals. "Any budding entrepreneur may indicate the dimension of a business activity, the turnover of business and get detailed information on what measures of state support he can get", - Tulemis Shotanov explained the essence of the idea.

In addition, there are many institutional issues, which NCE proposes the Government to solve. In particular, today, for business development in the agricultural sector it is necessary to create a public electronic database of all vacant lands; to provide land plots without an approved master plan, detailed planning plan, development plan; to transfer the service of provision of land plots to an electronic format; to reform the land code and so on.

In addition, NCE considers it necessary to carry out continuous monitoring of export and import procedures through the key checkpoints through periodic measurements of time and money on transportation of goods.

It is also necessary to adjust the branch program of agricultural development, so that the dynamic growth of export-oriented agribusiness on traditional types of products has become a priority. Import substitution, built on the basis of domestic demand will be ineffective, according to NCE.

It is necessary to increase the production of main types of agricultural products. The total export revenues from the sale of these goods can be increased more than twice, i.e. 5 billion USD or 1.8 trillion tenge. And that is 6.3% of China's imports of agricultural products, or 7,4% of the total Russian imports in value terms. Thus, Kazakhstan will enter the top ten exporting countries that supply agricultural products to China and Russia.

Representatives of NCE noted that the main problems of the business, impeding its development, are issues of availability of funds, procurement, unavailability or high cost of resources, administrative barriers, corruption, monopolization of industries, as well as heavy fines. It is offered to solve these problems at the legislative level in every region of the country through creation of a Business Support Fund with attraction of co-financing from the republican and local budgets for the provision of concessional lending to budding entrepreneurs and for rural business development with the transfer of the decision-making on lending from the center to the regional structures of NCE and the local Akimats.