Businessmen often grumble that a state does not like them and does not make favorable environment not only for developing but even for a simple existence. It is clear that many businessman are not angels, it is a piece of cake  for them to get a credit and not to give  it back. To build a small shop without any  sanction and not in the authorized place. Also, to settle a restaurant close to the wall of a state building, not to pay taxes or to pay them in funny amounts. To cheat a companion, so the list of such activities  may be very long.

         But again in all these sins partially the state’s fault is which does not punish citizens for breaking laws. I do not think that in any state with a strong state power someone will do such an absurd thing as building a restaurant at a state building wall, just maybe in a bad dream. Even a high-ranking official with a strong position will not afford such a thing, moreover after the first attempt a scandal.

         The state’s attitude towards entrepreneurs is a litmus paper of the economical state of a country. If a state policy promotes   development of business, creates necessary stimulus for the development and defines distinct, firm and equal conditions for all, then the economic starts rising. Of course it is not easy to build this. A recent film “An Iron Lady” about Margaret Thatcher, which within ten years and a bit of her prime minister’s work turned Great Britain from being “Europe’s sick person”  to a developed industrial country, reminded  about how it is hard to yield to a society. When Thatcher came to power, London’s streets were full of monstrous piles of rubbish and even rats run in the centre, so strongly was the economics paralyzed by the orientation to increasing a social role of the state.

         Literally speaking with an iron hand, regardless of demonstrations and throwing eggs, Thatcher broke the situation. If the first years of her ruling she was the most unpopular prime - minister in the whole history of Great Britain, now she is considered the most prominent British politician of the second part of the XX century .She again taught English people how to work not hoping to get assistance of the state, I will give just one figure, that during her time the number of  private house owners increased to more  then one million.

         But we are continuing to live setting hopes that the state as a magician will just about allow all our problems. But the state  has not yet created required conditions for a sustainable development of small and middle business. There are no cheap credits, and to untwist without an initial capital can not just more. Businessmen are not protected from officials’ kickbacks. This week I dropped in the nice cafй whose owners change with a speed of the kaleidoscope. The cafй is again closed, the present owner complains that she hardly succeed to give five thousand rubles to auditors,  as a cafe is in the centre and  to pass it perhaps is  too much uneasy for controlling bodies.

         There is a “Union of Manufacturers and Entrepreneurs of Abkhazia” which has to defend and lobby the interests of business, generate ideas able to stimulate the development of this   segment. The absence of the activity of the Union brings in a thought that businessmen   have not realized yet that they have to unite and really lobby their interests to become at last an influential force of  the society.
In a developed state entrepreneurs create a lion’s share of working places - while we do not fully realize this and at the state’s level too, we will not go far.
  
                                                                                                                   Nadezhda Venedictova