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Small Business Expands
Russia has more than 1 million small firms and the per-firm employment stepped up 6.7 percent. At the same time, the advance of small business in big cities and central Russia is not as healthy as in the northeastern part of the country, though St. Petersburg has faced certain problems already, according to the report of National Institute for System Study of Entrepreneurship Problems dedicated to small business performance in 2006.
As it turned out the performance of Russia’s small business is rather promising in terms of turnover, number of employees, tax receipts. The number of firms is going up as well; there were over a million (1,032,800) of them as of early this year, 5.5 percent up vs. a year earlier.
But the concentration differs from region to region. Russia’s average is 719.9 per each 100,000 residents, but North-West Federal District has 1,183 firms, Central District hosts 940 and Far East has just 679 per 100,000 people. Privolzhie and Siberia manifest average indicators, while the South Federal District has the lowest number of 490.
According to Russia’s Economic Development Ministry, small business generates between 15 percent and 17 percent of the country’s GDP. The 5 percent growth of small business couldn’t be called significant, signaled Opora Rossii President Sergey Borisov. “There is insignificant growth, but we can speak only of stabilization so far. Speaking about the growth will be possible if the rates exceed 10 percent… Moreover, small-business enterprises operate in trade rather than in the innovation fields of economy or construction,” Borisov said. The difficulties with connecting to power grids and the problem of cash registers are core concerns of the small business today, Borisov specified.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of June 19, 2007
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