Belarusian People’s Congress

“The matter is not about some crucial transformation and reorganization of everything. I would like to stress: we need to improve the course that we have chosen and have fairly successfully passed through the first two stages of reconstruction and stabilization. At this new stage, we need to switch from a catch-up strategy to advanced development,” Alexander Lukashenko said.

According to the head of state, in the world everything has long been divided: every piece of land, every market. “Therefore, in order to carve our new niches, we need to work hard, if you like, aggressively and, more importantly, efficiently, minimize costs, reduce product costs, and financially effective,” the President noted.

Alexander Lukashenko also listed the factors preventing forward movement. First and foremost it is the low labor productivity, which reached the level of $20,000 three years ago and has not changed since then. “We have inherited the gap with advanced countries in economic efficiency and we are still lagging behind. Moreover, this gap may become worse. Therefore, the most important task of the government is to overcome the negative trend by adopting a set of effective measures, which we have recently agreed on,” the President said.

Another factor is low innovation activity. “We are three times less effective than developed countries in terms of the share of high technologies in industry. As a result we produce low-tech goods with low value added,” Alexander Lukashenko noted.

The third factor is the lack of effective investment strategy of enterprises and entire industries. According to the President, the country has failed to secure a proper economic impact of investment projects, including those implemented with support from the state. There are cases when the indicators declared in the business plans have remained on paper. No serious marketing and engineering studies have been undertaken before the launch of projects. The development trends of the global market were not taken into account. “We will fail if we start manufacture goods and only then start looking for new markets,” the head of state said.

“The government needs to learn a lesson from this and devise such a development strategy which will help us effectively harness new technologies and methods of work,” the President said.