Today the business is afraid of the state and the state doesn’t trust the business. Such relationships require the rebooting and a new standard of regulation. How to restore trust between the business and the government? This problem was a key topic of the panel discussion “Small and medium business capacity building in Ukraine: effective policy, smart regulation and constructive dialogue” that was held as a part of the FORBIZ project presentation.
“We should teach the state to be predictable and explain the business why to introduce rules and persuade that it is done for its benefits. Only then the business will follow these rules and participate in their setting up,” the head of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) Oleksiy Honcharuk said during his speech at the discussion. The expert is convinced that creating a comfortable environment for the SME development isn’t possible without this setting up.
The Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade Maksim Nefedov also noted that it was a high time to implement new approaches because today the business is suffering from the existing bureaucracy and overregulation. He noted that now it was necessary to give a result instead of the simulation of this result and expressed the hope that the ministry together with the FORBIZ project and the BRDO would be able to present the first joint practices concerning the regulatory environment review, the SME development strategy and others in a few months.
The people’s deputy of Ukraine Viktoriya Ptashnyk also stands in solidarity with the participants of the discussion. She believes that the state’s role in the economy should be minimal and small and medium businesses shouldn’t be burdened with excessive and unnecessary regulatory elements, permits, etc. In her opinion, the effective deregulation requires to start with an analysis of the most problematic issues of the business, communicate with it and, most importantly, listen to it.
Presenting the position of businesses during the discussion, the executive director of the “Union of Ukrainian Entrepreneurs” Katerina Glazkova said that the deregulation – one of the first points that the business listed among urgent issues. That’s why, announced initiatives are required as never before and the professional business community is ready to support their implementation.
The president of the Kyiv School of Economics Tymofiy Mylovanov drew the attention of the audience directly to the capacity of small and medium enterprises. In his opinion, the medium enterprises, among other things, can lead our country to prosperity. That’s why, their support should be a priority for the government.
The Business Ombudsman Algirdas Semeta said that they received about 80% of the complaints directly from small and medium businesses and this fact stressed the importance to improve the regulation and simplify the administrative burden.
Participants agreed to consolidate their efforts to create a comfortable business environment that would allow small and medium enterprises of Ukraine to develop and be an engine of its economic growth. The FORBIZ project and the Better Regulation Delivery Office, the experts of which are working to create the business-oriented regulation, will be a kind of an independent platform for this.