Practice shows that small and medium-sized businesses contribute to addressing many modern economic and social issues through promoting economic growth, saturating the market with a variety of quality products and creating new jobs. In the period of transition of the national economy to a market economy a key role is therefore assigned to small and medium-sized businesses. The state takes all necessary measures to create an enabling environment for business activity, initiatives and innovation management, directing private producers to achieve the main objectives of the social and economic development strategy of Turkmenistan.
The activities carried out by the state to promote entrepreneurship are particularly aimed at coordinating activities of various structures in this sphere, conducting evaluation and analysis of the small business development programmes, organizing and conducting research in new forms of business structures and developing the proposals for support to small and medium-sized businesses. Legislative acts help to build the system of economic and legal measures of support for entrepreneurs.
Concessional lending, which enables the most successful and effectively operating private enterprises to use state support to expand production, plays a critical role in encouraging entrepreneurship, expanding market relations and enhancing competition between producers. It also allows increasing production volume, improving the quality of products, setting reasonable prices, etc.
A striking example of the effective support for entrepreneurs is purpose loans. For example, 300 million manat have been allocated at the initiative of the leader of Turkmenistan to support small and medium-sized businesses this year.
The state takes consistent steps to improve the legislation regulating property relations and aimed at supporting commodity producers and services sector. The Law of Turkmenistan on State Support of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises is updated to reflect the development of market relations. The laws on entrepreneurial activity, on enterprises, on joint stock associations and other legislative acts are also modernized. To date, the modern legal framework for developing entrepreneurship has been created in the country. The adoption of a number of laws and the State Programme for the Support of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses for 2011-2015 gave the business community in the country additional impetus to grow.
An important element of market infrastructure is the system of information support of entrepreneurial activity. It includes the database of legislative acts regulating business activities, information blocks of unused raw materials, spare manufacturing facilities, current state and changes in market conditions for a number of nomenclatural items, other marketing activities. In this context, emphasis should be placed on a positive role of the website of the Ministry of Justice of Turkmenistan www.minjust.gov.tm. Such modern information database helps businessmen orientate in the legal field.
As a market economy is developing, Turkmen entrepreneurs are shaping new features and modern values, improving business standards, promoting moral and ethical management, focusing on human dignity of an individual, recognition of his services and most effective use of his potential. Business ethics means honesty, openness, adherence to promises, the ability to function effectively on the market in accordance with current laws and existing rules and traditions.
When briefly summarizing the benefits of public-private partnership, we can say the following. The benefits to the national economy include intensive development of infrastructure and acceleration of renovations of fixed assets, improvement of the quality of construction, operation and management through innovations, incentives and competencies of private partners, greater access to private capital markets, improvement of the quality of products and services rendered to the population, reduction of fiscal burden and release of additional resources.
The benefits to the state include reduction of costs for creation and maintenance of social or other publicly significant infrastructure, mitigation of budget and other risks as a result of sharing of risk with a private partner, access to alternative sources of capital, enhanced reliability of public investment and increased probability of obtaining the desired result.
The benefits to small and medium-sized businesses include investment protection: a private company receives state-owned assets and government orders on the subject of agreement, guaranteed profitability and relative autonomy in decision making.
