BAKU, Azerbaijan, Oct. 6
Trend:
MPs of Kazakh Parliament’s Mazhilis [Lower Chamber] are discussing the bill "On industrial policy" in the first reading of the plenary session, Trend reports referring to Kazinform.
“The bill developed in accordance with last year's address of the country’s president [Kassym-Jomart Tokayev] to the people of Kazakhstan defines the basic principles, goals, and objectives of the processing industry. The most important task is to fully identify the industrial potential,” the Minister of Industry and Infrastructural Development of Beibut Atamkulov said at the session.
“In light of this, the president's instructions were timely. The need to update the legal framework is due to the following key factors: increase of tensions in the global economy, requiring decisive measures to revise industrial policy, solution of systemic business problems to ensure the self-sufficiency of the national economy, growth of the role of industrialization policy amid the instability in world prices for energy resources and raw metals, as well as signal for investors interested in investing in the production sector of Kazakhstan,” he noted.
According to him, the purpose of the bill is to ensure sustainable development of the processing industry by increasing the production of competitive, high-tech, export-oriented products and move away from the raw material development model.
The minister also spoke about the key points of the bill which provides definitions for more than 30 concepts. The key ones are industry, manufacturing, industrial policy, Industry 4.0, non-resource exports, and others.
One of the new features of the bill is the introduction of the government's competence to approve new incentive measures and infrastructure elements. The government incentives will be focused on efficient manufacturing enterprises. For this, the competence of the authorized body for the formation and approval of the list of priority goods is provided.
More than 4,000 products with high added value were selected. Support measures will be provided exclusively to manufacturers of goods from the above list. Monitoring of the fulfillment of these obligations will be carried out, and in case of non-fulfillment, the enterprises will have to return the budget funds in accordance with the rules.
Besides, there is envisioned the possibility of distributing a set of incentive measures by agreeing on increasing competitiveness. The entire list of state incentive measures was also revised in the process of developing the bill. In total, about 20 incentive measures will be available for business.
At the request of enterprises, a new incentive tool - an industrial grant has been developed. The grant will be provided for the modernization of production through co-financing.