Employment performance in small and medium business in Russian regions as an initial stage for the national priority project “Small and medium business and support for individual business initiative”

The situation regarding the number of employees in small and medium business in regions and in general raises doubts about the implementation of the currently prepared national project for the development of small and medium business in Russia up to 2024 in terms of its main indicator - the increase in the number of employees. This sphere has not yet reached the level of 2008 in the number of employees by the beginning of 2017. Moscow (a traditional leader of small and medium business), the Southern and Central federal districts as a whole demonstrated a drop in the number of employees at small legal entities from 2008 to 2016. Among medium-sized enterprises, the Ural Federal district demonstrated the greatest drop in employment. It is followed by the Northwestern Federal District and Moscow. In 2010-2016, there was a noticeable drop in employment among sole proprietors in the Republic of Tatarstan, the Volga Federal district, and Primorsky Krai. The measures implemented by the federal and regional support structures in this area clearly do not achieve the declared noble cause. It is necessary to radically change the Russian state policy related to small and medium businesses taking into account the accumulated positive and negative experience. The current policy is largely based on myths, including the myth that small business creates more jobs than large business entities. There is still no stable link between economic growth and the increase in the number of entrepreneurs in the regions and in the country as a whole. Support for startups often does not bring a significant increase in the number of jobs. State policy to support entrepreneurship is characterized by confused economic and social objectives. Thus, support for the self-employed is mainly a social policy to fight unemployment, and self-employed people behave in a rather different way in economic relations than entrepreneurs. It is necessary to overcome the autonomy of the policy to support small and medium businesses in relation to the overall strategy for the socio-economic development of our country.