The subsidies are to be stopped, there should not be any losses — Lukashenka is unhappy with the state of Belarusian industry. During the visit to Hrodna-Azot, the head of Belarus ordered to abandon the former practice of throwing money at the enterprise and immediately engage in its modernization.
The head of state once again announced the inadmissibility of allocating state subsidies for large industrial enterprises. He said so during his visit to Hrodna Azot, where he inspected the situation in the chemical industry of the region.
“My demands are known to you: there should not be any unprofitable and subsidized projects in the country. The allocation of budget funds to all sorts of alterations must be avoided,” Lukashenka said.
But what about large-scale campaigns to modernize state-owned enterprises? After all, authorities have allocated for wood processing 860 million dollars of budgetary funds, and some enterprises still cannot become profitable. The market is a tough place to be in.
“Enterprises that rely on these subsidies, or some kind of benefits — tax cuts or preferential loans — start out like a man who was thrown into the water, and he does not know how to swim, he starts flopping about. He has two choices : sink or swim,” said economist Leu Marholin.
In order for the enterprise not to sink, the authorities, before throwing money into the industry, finally began to wonder: what is this for? Apparently, a fresh example of a nuclear power plant has become a good lesson.
However, earlier, according to experts, the authorities repeatedly tried to artificially pump the money into enterprises to increase the purchasing power of the population. The result was a number of landslides of the Belarusian ruble and worsening of the economic conditions in the country.
The opposite solution to state subsidies in industrial modernization is the privatization of enterprises. However, the authorities understand this process in a peculiar way.
“The conditions are in fact unfavorable, I would say more — impossible. And so we see that every year plans for privatization are not being fulfilled. There may come a time when there will not be anything to privatize, these enterprises will for the most part die their own death, ” Leu Marholin believes.
According to experts, such death can be very painful and bring many problems to the population of the country and to the authorities in the form of high unemployment and social tension.
Zmitser Mitskevich, “Belsat”
