Yesterday, a roundtable was held in Moscow on issues of the effectiveness of state regulation in the trade sector, at which experts discussed the correlation between the trade industry and the economic growth, the effectiveness of amendments to the 2016 trade law, as well as the development of competition and the role of trade networks for the regional economy.
Answering the question of how the state regulation is affecting the Russian economy, the chairman of the Retail Companies Association, Sergey Belyakov said there should be an increase in financial indicators of the industry regulated by sectoral legislation: "There should be an improvement of the trade quality and performance, cost decrease, suppression of unfair competition within retail chains. All legislative initiatives need to be assessed in terms of whether they are effective or not. This expertise has not been done yet. All recent decisions do not remove costs for the economy, do not remove barriers, do not clear the field for activities, do not create conditions for improving business efficiency, but rather create new barriers. "
According to Sergei Belyakov, "first we create costs, and then we spend time, money, power, administrative resources to create a system to overcome these costs. This is a very strange logic."
Meanwhile, according to Konstantin Korishchenko, head of the Finance and Banking Department at the RANEPA, penetration of trade networks into the regional economy is accompanied by improvements in most macroeconomic indicators, such as regional GDP, regional inflation, employment and social characteristics. “The issue of regulation is the most important from the point of view of how the business will continue to develop. If we look at other economies, say, the United States, there is a fairly obvious competition between two whales in this business area - Walmart and Amazon. The competition is carried out for more advancement in various kinds of technological solutions. The investments made by a large business can be significantly advanced further by technologies. Thus, respectively, products become more affordable, cheaper and produce social effects. There is a medical motto ‘do no harm’, and state regulation should have the motto of the same kind. It should be appropriate, enabling the market to move closer to the consumer and better meet its needs, "Konstantin Korischenko said.
