Caspian Energy (CE): Timur Muratovich, in 2018 Kazakhstan climbed to the 28th place in the Doing Business rating. How do you rate the ease of conducting business in Kazakhstan?
Timur Suleimenov, Minister of National Economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan: The fact that Kazakhstan has entered the top-30 countries of the world in terms of the comfort of the business environment speaks for itself. At the same time, the achievement of such result has been the fruit of the many years of work carried out by the Government of RK on system-wide improvement of conditions for national entrepreneurs. Over the past 5 years, we developed 6 packages of amendments into the legislation, aimed at reducing the number of procedures, the length of time and financial expenses of business.
At present, the work on development of the 7th package of amendments into the legislation is underway, which provides introduction of systemic changes in the context of key indicators of the Doing Business rating.
According to the World Bank’s “Doing Business 2018” report, Kazakhstan took the 28th place as a result of the systemic work on business climate improvement. Besides, over the past 12 years Kazakhstan was four times seen in the list of top 10 countries implementing a high number of business climate improvement reforms.
In 2018, the World Bank placed Kazakhstan among the countries which implemented regulatory reforms in the context of over 3 indicators on ease of doing business in 2017 and 2018.
It is noteworthy that all undertaken measures are aimed at the final consumer – an entrepreneur. We want to create the most comfortable conditions to unleash potential of entrepreneurs and ensure their further development. Comprehensive support of the small and medium size businesses has always been a priority of the state policy of Kazakhstan.
In addition to regulatory reforms, a set of measures is taken in the country through adoption of different state and sectoral programs in order to support Kazakhstan’s entrepreneurship.
Owing to a comprehensive support of the state, entrepreneurship in Kazakhstan has become a relatively dynamic phenomenon. This is confirmed by 1.2 million small and medium-size enterprises operating in the country, which manufactured products worth 20.5 billion tenge.
According to 2017, the contribution made by small and medium-size enterprises to GDP makes 26.8%. At the same time, the employment in SME is growing year by year. Nowadays, more than third of the able-bodied population is employed in this area, which makes 3.2 million people.
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