Public Procurement as an Instrument for the Development of Small and Medium-Sized Business in Russia

Abstract

The issue of the development of small and medium-sized business is relevant for many years. In the article, the questions of the support of small business through the system of public procurement are considered. Within this research, the authors have tried to systematize the data on the dynamics and structure of the public procurements from the point of view of the participation of small business in the purchasing process from the moment of the adoption of the Federal Public Contracts Act that allowed to reveal certain tendencies. The main methods of the research are the vertical and horizontal analysis of time series, the correlation and regression models of the panel data. The data on the participation of small business in the public procurements are grouped by various characteristics depending on the analysis purpose. The groups of the data have been analyzed on 83 entities of the Russian Federation. It has allowed making a full-scale estimation of the efficiency of procurements from the economics point of view. To estimate the influence of procurements on the development of small business entities, three hypotheses have been put forward: an increase in a number of customers placing orders for the small business enterprises, and a decrease in a share of the customers who are not meeting the requirements of the law about the threshold of 15 % lead to the growth of the budget savings; an increase in a number of demands for small business enterprises leads to the increase in the number of these enterprises in the regions; the number of the applications placed for small business entities influences the turnover of small enterprises. On the basis of the panel data of the unified information system of the central and local government procurement for the period of 2011–2015, econometric models confirming the hypotheses have been built. The authors’ calculations may be used by the authorities for the further development of measures for the support of small business entities through the system of government procurements.