Sometimes people need help to start their businesses, while businesses or remote areas need resources to develop and enter export markets. The state, providing such assistance, helps to create new jobs and increase the income of the population.
In recent years, several incentives have been introduced for this purpose. In 2021, their total volume amounted to 51 trillion UZS. As a result, 170,000 new business entities were opened last year and more than 500,000 jobs were created.
Over the past six years, about 1.4 thousand benefits have been provided in the tax area alone.
Subsidies to support exports also have their effect by helping entrepreneurs to enter the foreign market. Last year, 280 billion UZS of such subsidies were allocated, of which 220 billion were allocated to compensate for transport costs. As a result, 2.8 thousand enterprises entered the foreign market for the first time.
At the same time, exporting enterprises are compensated for part of the costs of international standardization and certification, insurance, and even advertising. As a result, for every soum provided to the electrical industry, there are 870 UZS of export, 555 UZS in the textile industry, 273 UZS in the building materials industry.
To assist entrepreneurs, a system of interest compensation and loan guarantees has been created. To reduce the credit burden, the Fund for Entrepreneurship Support has taken obligations for 6 trillion 100 billion UZS, in the current year alone, compensation has been paid for 2 trillion 500 billion UZS.
However, there are cases of ineffective or inappropriate use of benefits. Thus, out of 127 types of subsidies paid from the state budget, 15 are not used in practice.
The effectiveness of incentives varies across sectors and industries. For example, 33 UZS of added value are created for every 1 UZS of benefits in agriculture. This figure is 30 UZS in healthcare, 22 UZS in education, 16 UZS in information technology.
At the meeting, instructions were given to increase the effectiveness of benefits.
“In recent years, to give an impetus to the development of economic sectors, we had to introduce an unprecedented number of benefits. Today it is time to understand what it gave, what conclusions were drawn, and what experience was gained. It is necessary to put in place every soum allocated from the budget, to increase the effectiveness of benefits”, Shavkat Mirziyoyev said.
The Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance were instructed to determine the performance indicators of all benefits and subsidies, to introduce a system of strict control over their effective use.
The task was set to organize a Monitoring Department in the Accounts Chamber and conduct a continuous analysis of the effectiveness of benefits.
It was emphasized that it is necessary to inventory tax and customs benefits, cancel inefficient ones, and unify benefits for foreign and domestic investors.
31 percent of tax benefits in the country fall on the city of Tashkent. The share of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, Jizzakh, Khorezm and Surkhandarya regions does not exceed 2 percent. At the same time, the requirements, taxes, benefits, subsidies, compensations and preferences are the same for all regions, be it, for example, the Oltinsoy district of Surkhandarya region or Mirabad district of the city of Tashkent.
Therefore, the Head of the state instructed to introduce a system in accordance with which tax benefits will be provided based on the level of development of the regions.
“Now we need to go to places, make targeted decisions, put the most remote areas on the path of development, correctly using the benefits”, the President said.
It was noted that it is necessary to raise the awareness of the population and entrepreneurs about this sphere, to expand the scale of the use of benefits. It was proposed to create a single open portal for subsidies and gradually introduce in it the functionality to provide all existing benefits.
