Azernews.Az

By Nigar Abbasova

President Ilham Aliyev signed a decree on additional measures to improve the country’s business environment and its position in international ratings on July 13.

A special commission and a secretariat of the commission has been created in accordance with the decree in order to improve the business and investment environment, increase its attractiveness for local and foreign investors, ensure the sustainability of the recently achieved rapid development in the sphere of entrepreneurship and strengthening the competitiveness, as well as to even more improve Azerbaijan’s position in international ratings. Azerbaijan’s First Deputy Prime Minister Yagub Eyyubov has been appointed the chairman of the commission.

Development of entrepreneurship in Azerbaijan remains a priority. The country is working to create a more attractive business environment, and become more alluring for foreign investments. The country aims to reduce its dependence on oil revenues and diversify economy.

A number of reforms have been recently introduced in the country in this regards. The reforms seek to stimulate business development in the country by introducing new privileges for entrepreneurs.

Simplification of the licensing procedures has allowed the companies and entrepreneurs to get licenses in a simple way, which in its turn positively affected business environment.

Presidential decree on changes to the Criminal Code that decriminalized a number of deeds and mitigated punishments for certain violations which do not pose a significant threat to the society was also aimed at boosting entrepreneurial activity in the country. The decision is expected to give a stimulus to developing entrepreneurship, creating favorable conditions for business, and stimulating people to get engaged in entrepreneurial activities.

Azerbaijan’s National Fund for Entrepreneurship Support (NFES) has allocated approximately 57.3 million manats ($ 37.9 million) on easy terms since early 2016, while about 1,100 entrepreneurs made use of means allocated by the fund.

Increasing foreign direct investment inflows, owing to government policies encouraging investment in the oil and gas sector, coupled with the growth of the non-oil sector have already made the Azerbaijani economic environment more appealing.

Earlier, Azerbaijan Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev said that it is planned to invest more than 1.1 billion manats ($ 0.70 billion) in the country’s industrial parks and areas.

Mustafayev also noted that the demands of new economic conditions, which emerged due to the recent regional and global economic processes, have led to the need to speed up economic diversification and to conduct preventive measures to support entrepreneurship. The minister also said reforms have been accelerated in all areas of the economy including logistics, banking sector, finance, agriculture, transportation and others.

“Monitoring of business activities was stopped for two years,” he noted.

Only 56 inspections were carried out in the first half of 2016, while this figure exceeded 40,000 in the first half of 2015.

With the approval of amendments proposed to the Tax Code, businessmen in Azerbaijan became eligible to get a document of the investment incentives. Under this document, half of the revenue of an individual entrepreneur, profits of legal entity are exempted from income tax for seven years.

Azerbaijan currently ranks 63 out of 189 countries in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index.

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Nigar Abbasova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @nigyar_abbasova

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