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On December 16-17, 2013 traditional 100 Steps Towards Favorable Investment Climate: Achievements and New Challenges conference was held in Moscow. The conference attendees including representatives of authorities, public organizations and business community focused on the results attained in the course of implementation of a presidential project associated with improvement of business climate in Russia.

Improvement of Business Climate in the Russian Federation business initiative is an entirely new format of cooperation between  the authorities and business community, the first experience in the field of equal dialog and cooperation based on practices and ideas generated by businessmen. The conference organizers believed that it was time to sum up the results, to assess successes and failures and to identify goals for the future. It was time to set new objectives for business climate Improvement.  

The conference participants taking part in the discussion spoke of the necessity to elaborate a unified KPI system. Petr Fradkov, Chairman of the Board and Director General,   Exkar, said: “Individual qualitative and quantitative index should be established for each element of the system. For instance the amount of credits and the number of issued policies may become such indexes for development institutions”.

Good business climate and available infrastructure were named among key factors for SMEs successful development.  Kaluga Region was set as an example of a region with high large business concentration. However, according to Ruslan Zalivatsky, the regional authorities also strive to create favorable conditions for SMEs development.  He said: “The list of Kaluga Region instruments to support SME development includes the  state foundation for business support in Kaluga Region providing financial and non-financial support, business incubators offering marketing and information support to new projects, collective use centers and consulting projects, like Business Week”.   

In 2014 the regions will have a right to offer tax breaks to SMEs, which will result in increase in the number of entrepreneurs. In this case, according to Vitaly Eremeev, the head of the representative office of the Agency for Strategic Initiatives in the Central Federal District, it is very important to provide administrative and information support to SMEs.   He said: “This is to speed up the process of business products’ entry top the domestic and foreign markets and will help the existing SMEs retain their market positions”.