by MARINA SELINA
President Dmitry Medvedev believes in the measures that will make life easier for small businesses and encourage business activeness of the population. Presidential decree drawn nowadays will minimize surprise inspections of small businesses (to one examination every three years). Before launching an inspection, a regulating structure will have to acquire a permit from the regional prosecutor's office. "This provision is quite important because officials are clearly overdoing it with surprise inspections these days," to quote Boris Titov of Business Russia who attended the conference in the Kremlin where Medvedev brought up the matter of small businesses.
As a matter of fact, Medvedev has quite a few ideas concerning small businesses. Registration of small business enterprises will require but a letter of advice. Licensing is to give way to compulsory liability insurance. Small businesses will be permitted to buy leased property at a discount. Regional and
municipal authorities will be permitted to leave leased property to socially important small businesses.
The authorities expect small businesses to deliver, of course. "I trust you haven't forgotten the objective we all agreed to strive for: to have 60-70% of the active population in small businesses by 2020," Medvedev said.
According to the data compiled by Business Russia, only 17% Russians are involved in small businesses nowadays (this figure exceeds 40% in the United States and amounts to 70% in Japan).
Experts point out in the meantime that the authorities have already tried to stimulate small businesses and revive the population's interests in them. A debureaucratization campaign launched in 2002 aimed to ease administrative pressure on private businesses. "Some barriers became history indeed but new ones
appeared in the form of all sorts of permits, accreditations, and God alone knows what else," Igor Nikolayev of the FBK Strategic Analysis Department said. The specialist is convinced that it is necessary to begin with reorganization of civil service itself and therefore to focus on dealing with the cause and not effect.
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