چگونه کارآفرینی می تواند پس از فروپاشی یک سیستم اقتصادی سوسیالیستی ارتقا یابد

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical observations from postcommunist countries to suggest which policy sets applied make most sense for the promotion of micro-enterprises. Three overall conclusions can be drawn. First, an early, comprehensive and radical reform is the superior approach for the promotion of entrepreneurship, because the prevalence of rent seeking interests is so easily established and it is so difficult to break. The second conclusion, however, is that a certain space for small enterprises can be created even in a very corrupt economy dominated by severe rent seeking. A third conclusion is that the Russian deregulation of 2002 represents the worst of all worlds, because all its elements were incremental.

Statistics on SMEs are few and hard to come by. Table 2 contains the best assessments I can find in international statistics on the contribution of SMEs to GDP for various years. They vary from 8 percent of GDP in Belarus to 64 percent in Hungary. Undoubtedly, most of these numbers are far too low, but a clear pattern is apparent. Central Europe and the Baltics derive something like 60 percent of GDP from their SMEs, while countries in Central Asia and the Caucasus seem to derive 30–40 percent of GDP from SMEs. Georgia has probably swung up to the first group now, while hardly any other post-Soviet countries have done so. At the bottom with around one-fifth of GDP from SMEs we find Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, the three most characteristic large enterprise economies. A common assumption is that a large SME sector is positively correlated with good governance. In order to test this hypothesis we plot the contribution of SMEs to GDP for years for which statistics are available against the same countries ranking on the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International of 2006 (Fig. 2). Not surprisingly, the correlation between low corruption and a large SME sector turns out to be quite impressive. An underlying issue of great importance is resource endowment. A great endowment of natural resources tends to breed a dominance of large enterprises, which all too easily marginalize SMEs. Most resource extraction involves great economies of scale as well as large rents. The abundance of resource rents crowds out SMEs which seem irrelevant and are not offered conditions to thrive. Similarly, large-scale agriculture – whether Kazakhstan's large grain fields or Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan's cotton fields – crowd out SMEs, which thrive in Kyrgyzstan with plenty of vegetables, fruits, and rice as well as shepherds. Early land reform occurred in countries where small-scale agriculture made sense regardless of other policies: Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and Albania. Three overall conclusions can be drawn from these observations. First, an early, comprehensive and radical reform is the superior approach for the promotion of entrepreneurship, because the prevalence of rent seeking interests is so easily established and it is so difficult to break. Georgia appears to be the only country to have made a real breakthrough, and it did so only after a radical regime change with a sharp discontinuity of all policies. The second conclusion, however, is that a certain room for small enterprises can be created even in a very corrupt economy dominated by severe rent seeking. There are several preconditions for success of such a reform. It must be led from the political top, and the reform needs to have clearly defined subjects (enterprises below a certain size or within certain sectors) to avoid gray zones. It must not threaten the powers that be. Such a reform must be simple and radical in its design. The lump-sum tax for small entrepreneurs and peasants remains the clearest model. The Doing Business list appears to have provided a viable alternative, which might lead to further systemic reforms. In either case, though, such a partial reform is likely to lead to an SME sector in a small enterprise trap under a glass ceiling, which may be an equilibrium but surely a suboptimal one. A third conclusion is that the Russian deregulation of 2002 represents the worst of all worlds, although it delivered positive results for several years. The reform had no clear boundaries in any direction, and all its elements were incremental. After a few years, the bureaucracy had removed the limitations on its powers that the reform attempted to impose. Russia has declined the most on the doing business ranking, 26 steps, from 2006 to 2011 (Table 1). Overall, taxation and elementary regulation seem to be key. Small enterprises need to be left alone by the state to thrive. Predominantly, they finance themselves in the early stages of economic development from retained profits. Therefore, remittances are of great importance, as they come in limited amounts to many people, and often the person earning the remittance comes home after having acquired professional and entrepreneurial skills in a more developed country. Institutions for external financing, by contrast, tend to be oriented to financing on a larger scale, with microfinancing being an important exception, which has so far played a minor role (Buyske, 2007). Small enterprises are reluctant to go to court, fearing the cost. Foreign direct investment tends to be attracted to countries where small enterprises thrive, but the causality is rather that foreign investors come where problems have been solved than the other way around. Moreover, the biggest draw of FDI in the post-Soviet region has been oil in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, and the oil industry has not created conducive conditions for small enterprises. The experience has been very different in Central Europe and the Baltics, where a large diaspora returned with limited capital of their own and relevant skills to set up all kinds of small enterprises. Turning to the Asian formerly socialist economies, they have all had gradualist policies, and the successful ones – China and Vietnam – seem to fit the pattern of allowing agriculture and micro-enterprises to develop with great freedom from the state, and these newly developed enterprises have been allowed to rise. But, as the Economist (March 12, 2011, p. 13) comments on the Chinese regulation of the private sector: “It is a wonderfully flexible system, but without a consistent rule of law, companies are prey to the predilections of bureaucrats.” A precondition for their success seems to have been relatively limited resource endowment, while countries with more resources, Cambodia and Laos, have found reform benefitting SMEs more difficult. A suggestion coming out of this reasoning is the logjam can be broken, at least for former communist countries, by combining taxation, regulation and licensing in one single measure, namely a low lump sum tax for small entrepreneurs. Anything that complicates the tax system leads to both more evasion and to corruption. Strengthening the small business sector economically and politically is not a panacea, but in many countries today it would be a step in the direction of sustainable development. In order to cross the critical hurdle that may be around 40 percent of GDP, affirmative action is required to move the economy from a suboptimal equilibrium with few small entrepreneurs to an optimal equilibrium with 50–60 percent of GDP being produced by small enterprises. There are significant economic benefits to be reaped from such a policy, but the main gains would be political. Encouraging small entrepreneurs into the formal business sector would greatly strengthen them politically and move former communist countries towards more stable, pro-property rights policies.