The President's address raised the classic economic depictions of the plan vs the market. The Head of State emphasized that everything works in progress. It is about comparing the socio-economic programs of those supporting radical changes and the state five-year development plan for 2021-2025. It should be asserted that the rhetoric of building a regulation-free clean market today is out of line with economic realities of even Western countries.
А. Lukashenko rightly stated the threat of indiscriminate privatization of enterprises and liquidation of weak businesses. Modern enterprises should be socially responsible. And this is not a whim of the Belarusian state, a certain burden that constrains efficiency and the possibility of making a profit.
Profit is no longer a key priority for the major Western economies. A similar statement about changing priorities was made in August 2019 by the largest U.S. companies. Now the most critical part of success will be social investments, especially in staff development, as well as in various organizations that make the life of citizens more comfortable and acceptable.
Home businesses and state-owned corporations should earn from added, not saving on a person. A worker who works from morning till night and at the same time being unable to meet their needs, sooner or later burns out. And this results in decreased labor productivity and a loss of competitiveness of the whole enterprise, after which no question of any profit may be raised.
These theses of Western corporations do not relate to the category of declarative rhetoric aimed at mitigating social tension from the growth of property stratification in society. Real cases and practice show that the activity of Western European developed countries and the United States over recent four years has moved towards nationalization, strengthening state regulation, support for low-income segments of the population, including direct cash payments, business support, significant easing of tax policy, the practice of strict administrative measures, closing borders and protecting the internal market. In fact, many economic experts have proclaimed the decline of the open society and free market doctrine, which was previously proposed as a panacea for economies intended to be suppliers of raw materials within peripheral capitalism.
The economic impact of the coronacrisis, in fact, have made these measures even more obvious and forcibly applied. It turns out that the program of market changes is undertaken only around an abstract, educational and historical image of the market. This only misleads about the real vector of developing the world economy which is increasingly close to the socially oriented model of the Belarusian state.