Strategies of the Development of Entrepreneurship and SME

2. DEVELOPMENT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SME SECTOR IN THE BSECCOUNTRIES 13The Black Sea region is a distinct geographical area with strategically located at junctionof Middle- and South-Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasian region, and the Europeanpart of the CIS expert Belarus spreading over several thousand kilometers long territory. It isdifficult to state that there is a homogenous strategic interest of its all 12 Members Statesexcept of developing human right, building democratic society in all countries, developing theireconomies toward the market one and promoting good governance.It is a promising good sign, that within the framework of BSEC more confidence buildingmeasures are taking place in the region affected by conflict, like Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh,South Ossetia and Transdnistria. However, new conflict area might be occurring day by day,like in Eastern-Turkey with the Kurd minority. This is why promoting entrepreneurship andeconomic development, this could contribute to build social cohesion, security and stability.More than 3 million SMEs in the BSEC region employee over 21 million workers in total,while the number of unemployed amounts to more than 10 million.Since the foundation of the BSEC WG on SMEs the transition countries continued tomake progress in economic reforms. The countries in South-Eastern Europe (SEE) made themost progress, spurred on by their inspiration to join the EU. Bulgarian and Romania alreadysucceeded. Croatia, The former Yugoslav Macedonia and Bulgaria in SEE together with Georgiafrom the Caucasus are in the group of the first ten top reformers in 2006-2007 in accordancewith the latest World Bank Doing Business 2008 Report. 14 Eastern Europe and Central Asia, asa region, surpassed East-Asia this year in the ease of doing business. Several of the region'scountries have even passed many economies of the old advance EU countries on this score.It is the Caucasian transition economies significant positive changes have been observedin all three countries. It seems that there is a certain competition among these countries andperhaps Armenia is the leader concerning good governance and transparent support system inthe filed of the SME sector.Within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) only the Russian Federation andUkraine improved their business performance. Moldova remained the poorest and unhealthiestcountry of the region with growing debt, lack of energy resources, problems and hugeunemployment making the matters worst with the issue of Transdnistria.The World Bank Doing Business Project provides objective measures of businessregulations and their enforcement across 178 countries. The Project aims at ranking theeconomies on their ease of doing business, with first place being the best. A high ranking onthe ease of doing business index means the regulatory environment is conducive to theoperation of business. This index averages the country's percentile rankings on 10 topics, madeup of a variety of indicators, giving equal weight to each topic.As the World Bank states 15 :“Albania introduced a new fiscal package which reduced the tax burden on firms bylowering the corporate income tax by 3% and amending depreciation rates. Labor taxes andcontributions were lowered by 9 percentage points.”13 Prepared by Dr. Antal SZABÓ, UNECE retired Regional Adviser on Entrepreneurship and SMEs14 See at http://www.doingbusiness.org/features/Reform2007.aspx.15 See at http://www.doingbusiness.org/reformers/ECA.aspx11