Russian Government has reduced targets for small business national project

The Russian Government has approved the national project "Small and Medium Enterprises" datasheet, Kommersant informs. The national project consists of several federal projects, including creating a single digital platform for SMEs, the involvement of potential entrepreneurs in small businesses, and a project to accelerate SMEs. Also, a project for scaling up the system of self-employed is included in the national project.

The national project's goal is to reach 23 million people in small businesses by 2024 (the previous figure was 25 million people), and the self-employed – to 2.1 million people (instead of 2.4 million people).

Now SMEs employ 21.16 million people, including 1.2 million self-employed (who have registered their status with the Federal Tax Service).

The number of new small businesses is set to grow from the current 760,000 to 1.067 million in 2024. This figure reflects that the Government does not expect good growth in the small business sector, experts say.

Small and medium-sized businesses are planned to be supported by state purchases from the current 3.5 trillion rubles up to 5 trillion rubles in 2024.

The national project also proposes creating transitional tax regimes to liberalize legislation to stimulate small businesses to expand their business.

At the same time, The Bell found out that according to the statistics of the Unified Register of Small and Medium Enterprises of the Federal Tax Service, since 2016, the number of small and medium enterprises has been decreasing by 6-10% per year. During this time, 50 thousand legal entities ceased to exist. Micro-enterprises (the most common type of business) decreased by 1.5% in 2019. The total number of SMEs over the past year has decreased by 2%.