Strategies of the Development of Entrepreneurship and SME

GENERAL ASSESSMENT OF THE BSEC WG ON SMEsremarks:(i)(ii)(iii)(iv)(v)(vi)(vii)(viii)Summarizing the activities of the BSEC WG on SMEs, we can make the followingIt is a positive mark, that the WG on SMEs is working and provide platform fordialogue and exchange of policies and best practices concerning SME developmentint he BSEC Members States;The Chairmanship-in-Charge of the WG on SMEs is not transparents and dubious. Itis not clear which Government authority and which national SME support institutionis in charge of managing the WG’s activities. Prior the new Meeting the newlyappointed Chairman-in-Charge is searching for agenda and trying to identify projectproposals, which might be interesting for the Member States. This practice has to bechagned in the future.BSEC Member States are participating in the Meeting of the WG on SMEs no equally.Only Armenia, Bulgaria and Turkey participate in all five Meetings, while Azerbaijan,Greece, Russian Federation and Ukraine only four events, Georgia and Romania onlythree times, while the other only two times.The List of the WG on SMEs is not updated. It is recommended, that PERMIS requestMember States nominee Representatives of the 4 appropriate groups in accordancewith the TOR of the WG on SMEs amended at the 8th Meeting of the BSEC Council ofMinisters of Foreign Affairs held in Yerevan on 18 April 2003. This List should becirculated, put on the PERMIS BSEC web-site and continuously updated.The WG on SMEs did not fulfilled one of its major tasks: regularly review theimplementation of this Declaration and the development of entrepreneurship and the(private) SME sector in BSEC Member States evaluation. This is an urgent task andPERMIS should find a solution jointly with the Chairmanship-in-Charge to vary outthis task. This might be a major objective for a Ministerial Meeting during 2008 or2009.In the area of the ITC it is time to look at the development of a BSEC SMEInformation Network based on governmental legislations, procedures on enterprisecreation, doing businesses, governmental and non-governmental entrepreneurshipsupport institutions, etc.Joint initiatives by BSEC member States are very week and irrelevant.BSEC PERMIS by means of collaborative and cooperative efforts particularly with theRepresentation of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and its Representative for Turkeyhas engaged in a campaign to raise public awareness in the BSEC region of theimportance of SMEs. 2006 marks the tenth year of ongoing cooperation betweenBSEC PERMIS and KAS. The UNECE until the retirement of its Regional Adviser onEntrepreneurship and SMEs in 2005 and from this time on continuing as a retired UNRegional Adviser, the National Institutions of some of the BSEC Member Statesresponsible for SMEs have also contributed to those joint endeavours. Through aseries of 35 Workshops that have been organized jointly by BSEC PERMIS and KAS,it has been possible to address various issues involved in the development of SMEsand reach guiding conclusions.From the inauguration of the BSEC WG on SMEs in 2002 until now, 24 SME-relatedevents were held including 5 meetings of the WG on SMEs, 11 specific SME oriented topicsorganized by PERMIS BSEC, KAS and partially UNECE, 2 workshop held by KOSGEB and 6 otherhigh-level conferences or business forums. The list of these events see in Annex 2. To providea transparent platform for these events BSEC Secretariat maintains a special web-site on“Areas of Cooperation – SMEs” at the following link:http://www.bsec-organization.org/areas_of_cooperation.aspx?ID=SMEs.10