Incentives to establish certified lab and attract highly qualified specialist. SME Sub-Council Meeting

On August 2, with coordination of IC Armenia and under the leadership of the RA Deputy Minister of Economy, Rafayel Gevorgyan the 11th session of the SME Development Sub-Council took place.

Rafayel Gevorgyan noted that RA Government plans to ensure an annual growth of gross factor productivity of at least 5%, and in order to achieve this indicator, a number of measures are being implemented, including targeted loans/leasing mechanisms and interest rate subsidies. Though these ongoing programs are quite effective, still this is not enough to achieve the intended end results. Considering the low level of productivity of SMEs operating in Armenia, as well as the Government plan for 2021-2026, as well as Appendix N1 of the decision N1902-L of November 18, 2021, the actions "2.1 Technological modernization and optimization of business processes in strategic and priority areas", "2.2 Involvement of highly skilled specialists in the labor market in local companies" are included in the agenda of the session in the highlight of issue of making changes in the decision N 355-L of March 26, 2020 "On approving the measure of modernization of the economy".

Hovsep Patvakanyan, the Head of the Investment Council of Armenia, presented the project jointly developed with the Ministry of Economy of the Republic of Armenia, which suggests compensation models of up to 50% compensation of capital costs for those entrepreneurs who jointly with any of the RA scientific research institutes, higher education institutions will create and operate laboratories with internationally recognized certification in the territory of the latters. Through these labs, services will be provided both to the given businessmen and to third partiess. The second appendix of the project proposes to provide compensation to those businessess that will hire high-skilled specialists who have not lived in Armenia during the last 12 months. According to the project, high-skilled specialists is proposed to be defined as a professional who either graduated from one of the top 400 universities in the QS World University Rankings and/or has at least 10 years of work experience in a company included in international indexes. The amount of compensation can reach up to 70% of the salary, but not more than 2,000,000 Armenian drams, if the high-skilled specialist has a doctoral degree and, along with the main job, also teaches at one of the RA universities.

The legislative package was included in the agenda of the RA Government session.