Belarusian Entrepreneurs Will Appear In The Red Book Soon

Business does not want to work in the red.

Most of all individual entrepreneurs decreased in Minsk. The number of individual entrepreneurs in the Brest, Vitebsk, and Homel regions is also decreasing, according to the thinktanks.by portal writes.

The Ministry of Taxes and Duties published statistics on the quantitative change of entrepreneurs in the first quarter of this year. The information is disappointing: the number of individual entrepreneurs in the country is steadily declining.

In total, in January the number of entrepreneurs decreased by 1003, February showed a slight increase, plus 19, in March we lost another 1171 individual entrepreneurs. As of April 1, 2022, 270,965 entrepreneurs remained in the country. The losses are still small, but there is a clear downward trend.

There are the most significant losses in the capital. In January — minus 639 businessmen, in February — minus 413, in March — minus 663.

One of the reasons is obvious: the tax conditions have deteriorated significantly. It is no longer possible for the majority to use the simplified tax system. The transition to a common system guarantees a sharp increase in the tax burden. There are still problems with the registration of individual entrepreneurs in Minsk.

The number of individual entrepreneurs in Brest, Vitebsk and Homel regions is decreasing. The situation resembles a swing that "goes into the red" in the Mahiliou region, and only the Minsk region showed a noticeable increase in February, but perhaps these "recruits" are those entrepreneurs who could not register an individual entrepreneur in the capital.

All this happens despite the fact that the procedure for liquidating an individual entrepreneur in Belarus is much longer and more complicated than the registration procedure. Many prefer to simply suspend their activities – formally to have an individual entrepreneur, but not to receive income and not to pay taxes and contributions to the Social Insurance Fund. It is not prohibited. Those entrepreneurs who hastily left the country because of the events of 2020-2022, did so mostly.

The state has always had a tense relationship with individual entrepreneurs. The reasons are simple: these people rely on their own and exist, in fact, outside the system. It is the most competitive and adaptive category of business processes. It is hard to put pressure on businessmen, it is difficult to force them to do anything.

Some officials would be happy to destroy the entrepreneurs as a class, but the problem is that the “ants”, the individual entrepreneurs, do work that the cumbersome and clumsy state machine cannot do. Individual entrepreneurs cover many small but very important needs of the society, satisfy the demand in trade, provide many types of services, transport, build, repair, etc. It is impossible to replace them, there were such attempts in the USSR. It really didn’t work.

There are several parallel processes in Belarus at once. The number of capable people has been steadily falling for a long time in the country. In February 2022, 4,246.5 thousand people were employed in the Belarusian economy, a year earlier - 4,296.6 thousand people, in February 2020 - 4,335.2 thousand. The number of employed has decreased by 88.7 thousand people just in the last two years.