Almost Br19 billion will be allocated to support small businesses in the Vitebsk region in 2013-2015

Almost Br19 billion is planned to be allocated from the Vitebsk region budget to support small and medium-sized businesses over the next three years. The State Program for the Support of Small and Medium-sized Businesses in the Vitebsk Region for 2013-2015 was adopted today at an extraordinary session of the Vitebsk Regional Council of Deputies, a BELTA correspondent reports.

Presenting the program, Valentin Tsvetkov, Head of the Department for the Development of Entrepreneurship and Consumer Market of the Vitebsk Regional Executive Committee, noted that the document's goal is to further form favorable conditions for the sustainable development of small and medium-sized businesses. Financial support measures for small businesses will facilitate their access to financial resources, enabling them to increase the production of goods and services, including stimulating the production of export-oriented, import-substituting, and energy-saving products, and the creation of new jobs.

In an interview with a BELTA correspondent, Valentin Tsvetkov noted that almost Br1 billion is planned to be allocated for state financial support to small businesses in the form of providing financial resources on a repayable, compensated, or gratuitous basis, and subsidies to reimburse part of the interest on bank loans. The program also provides for significant funds for banks to grant preferential loans, including microloans.

Property support for small and medium-sized businesses will also be provided, which will allow for the involvement in circulation of unused or inefficiently used capital structures, production areas, and unfinished conserved capital structures owned by the state. In addition, measures are planned to improve the information support for entrepreneurship, which will expand its access to information resources and prompt legal information.

As Valentin Tsvetkov noted, entrepreneurship in the Vitebsk region represents a promisingly developing sector of the economy, gradually increasing its contribution to ensuring the economic growth of the region. The share of small and medium-sized businesses in the gross regional product increased from 9% in 2011 to 16.7% in 2012. The share of innovative products produced by small and medium-sized businesses reached 26.8% last year. The non-state sector invested Br3.4 trillion in the region's economy. Br2.7 billion was allocated from the regional budget to support entrepreneurship in 2012. It accounts for 61.3% of the region's exports (excluding petroleum products). In the region's small and medium-sized businesses, there are 8.9 thousand legal entities and 25.8 thousand individual entrepreneurs.