Belarus President: entrepreneurship should be encouraged for developing small towns

Entrepreneurship should be encouraged for the sake of developing small towns in Belarus, head of state Alexander Lukashenko told a seminar of executives of national and local state administration bodies on November 29. The President remarked, with a view to stimulating free enterprise in small towns additional measures had been taken to enable simplified preferential taxation, to allow selling unused and ineffectively used state-owned facilities at auctions with the starting price as low as one basic wage and to allow gratuitous handover of such facilities for specific investment projects. The Belarusian government has adopted and is implementing a State Programme for the Development of Provinces, Small and Medium Urban Communities in 2007-2010. Securing growing welfare of the nation through rational distribution of workforce as well as raising the level of development, effectiveness and the competitive ability of the provincial economy are the key goals of the programme. According to the President, turning small and medium urban communities into the most advantageous and safest places to work and live is the strategic purpose of the programme. Alexander Lukashenko believes, the development of small and medium towns will propel the development of the entire national economy. “It is a major programme, a major issue. Nobody will be able to lay it aside and forget about it. The issue is severely monitored. People should be engaged in dealing with the tasks. Everyone should work for the programme’s accomplishment. People should understand that we are doing it for the children and grandchildren,” underscored the President. Alexander Lukashenko pointed out, as the second five-year plan is approaching its end, certain preliminary results can be summed up, things to address and ways to address the things can be determined. The President underlined, now it is necessary to examine and detect drawbacks, to assess the need for higher goals in order to successfully cope with the complex tasks and to take timely additional incentive measures in order to ensure the fastest growth of the economy and social sphere in provinces. The scale of the tasks to handle requires the tightest collaboration of all branches and levels of the government, public organisations and individuals, the President believes.