Kazakh PM, Almaty entrepreneurs eye business environment dev't issues

The attendees discussed the current issues and the most promising areas for small and medium enterprise development.

They considered a lot of issues that include subsidizing the city bus operating companies, digitalizing tax administration, improving the efficiency of advisory bodies, providing online access to the information on land plots, creating small industrial zones, transferring the non-core assets of the local executive authorities to the market environment, and establishing a full-fledged Business Service Center in Almaty.

Bakytzhan Sagintayev highlighted that the business development is one of the overriding priorities for the Government, and, in this respect, the key aim is to create favorable conditions for the development of the domestic business.

In this regard, the government is working in a variety of ways, in particular, taking financial support measures. For instance, it has financed over 13,000 business projects and adopted the Productive Employment and Mass Entrepreneurship Development Program that grants microloans up to KZT18 million with the nominal interest rate of no more than 6%.

In addition to the financial support, there is also a legislative support including business deregulation measures. Thus, for today, the number of required permits has been reduced by threefold and the state control and supervisory functions have been audited. The government has drawn up practical recommendations that abandon the existing order of conducting selective inspections and most of the inspections under a special order.

It was noted that an important issue is the requirements as to the regulatory legal acts and technical reports for the construction of health and education facilities. To solve the above issues, a working group is making necessary changes to the construction code and regulations. The next stage is to abolish over 30 obsolete sanitary regulations for health and education organizations.

To address the problems of groundless tax inspections, the number of scheduled inspections is getting lower and the counter inspections of suppliers are excluded, and so on. As a result, the number of tax inspections will be reduced by 40%.

What is more, a lot has been done to ensure business access to public and quasi-public procurement procedures. In this regard, an electronic procurement platform and a category and pre-qualification system have been introduced. The work is also underway to increase the share of local content for each strategic company. In particular, an analysis is carried out to form the list of products and the demand from large enterprises.