Assessment of the economic attractiveness of the spheres of economic activity of small enterprises according to statistical survey data

Burda Semen Alekseevich Postgraduate student, Department of System Analysis and Information Processing, Kuban State Agrarian University 350044, Russia, Krasnodarskii krai, g. Krasnodar, ul. Kalinina, 13, of. 202 ek saburda@mail.ru Serchenko Ol'ga Sergeevna Student, Department of Economic Cybernetics, Kuban State Agrarian University 350044, Russia, Krasnodarskii krai, g. Krasnodar, ul. Kalinina, 13, of. 209 ek olyaserchenko@yandex.ru

Burda Aleksei Grigor'evich Doctor of Economics Professor, the department of Economic Cybernetics, Kuban State Agrarian University 350044, Russia, Krasnodarskii krai, g. Krasnodar, ul. Kalinina, 13, kab. 209 ek agburda@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction. In order to identify promising areas of economic development, identify priority points of economic growth in territorial and sectoral aspects, the concept of attractiveness has recently been widely used in economic science and practice of economic management. In some cases, they talk about the attractiveness of territories ^[1],[2], in others – about the attractiveness of industries and types of economic activity ^{[6],[7],[12],[14]}. Etymologically, attractiveness is associated with the word "attractive", about which it is said in the explanatory dictionary: "Such a person attracts, disposes to himself, likes. Attractive appearance. An attractive prospect (tempting)" ^[3]. Attractiveness in the broad sense of the word is understood as "the ability of an object to attract positive attention, arouse interest, joy and desire to repeat contact" ^[4], such an interpretation of the concept, in our opinion, is applicable not only in psychology, but also in economics.

In the economic sphere, attractiveness is most often spoken about in relation to investments – the term investment attractiveness has become common. However, economic systems are attractive not only for investors and investments. After all, investments in fixed assets by themselves are not capable of producing products, creating new value. Therefore, investment objects should be attractive not only for investors, but also for the workforce, competitive wage levels are laid in investment projects, and long-term plans for the development of production and economic systems are associated with socio-economic aspects of development, respectively, there is an objective attractiveness considered by potential employees. We believe that it makes sense to talk about both social and professional attractiveness. In the labor market, the attractiveness of certain professions is assessed by the level of remuneration, guaranteed and potential income, conditions for the implementation of labor functions and social packages provided, and other parameters. In the field of small business, where the owner is often an employee at the same time, it is advisable to consider the entrepreneurial attractiveness. In our opinion, the definition of economic attractiveness deserves closer consideration by representatives of economic science and interpretation from a scientific point of view, since today there is a shortage of serious comprehensive studies of the category of economic attractiveness – this was felt by the authors of the article in the process of bibliographic search during the preparation of the presented material, since the available publications mainly consider only investment attractiveness, and economic attractiveness in general, insufficient attention is paid.  

The purpose of the study is to assess the economic attractiveness of the spheres of economic activity of small enterprises according to statistical survey data.

Material and methods of research. The preliminary results of the Continuous Statistical Observation of Small and Medium-sized Businesses for 2020 conducted by Rosstat in the first half of 2021, which are posted on the official website of the Federal State Statistics Service on December 30, 2021, were used as material for the study ^[5]. The results of the study and their discussion. We share the opinion that the assessment of the attractiveness of economic activities should be based on the goals pursued by various entities and the tasks of an investment and social nature ^[6],[7]. Ultimately, it is the stakeholders – investors, creditors, entrepreneurs, employees, government agencies – who set criteria and indicators that reflect their interests to assess the attractiveness of geographical and industrial objects. Table 1 presents generalizations of definitions of attractiveness found in the literature in various contexts in relation to economic systems.

Table 1 – Definitions of economic and entrepreneurial attractiveness in modern publications

M. G. Platonova and Z. V. Chebotareva note that "when studying the economic attractiveness of small business, attention should be paid both to the peculiarities of the organizational structure of the enterprise and to the economic attractiveness of the industry" in which it operates ^[8]. Without identifying economic attractiveness with investment, they consider the first concept to be broader, reflecting the economic and social effectiveness of small business activities, they propose to calculate the attractiveness coefficient ^[8] of a small enterprise – a coefficient that is essentially the sum of the coefficient of return on sales (profit divided by revenue) and the coefficient of the level of wages at the enterprise in relation to the average in the economy (the average salary at the enterprise divided by the average salary in the economy). This indicator really reflects the economic efficiency and social significance of the activities of a small enterprise, however, the lack of information on the profits of small enterprises in the survey materials published by Rosstat for 2020 prevents the practical application of the above approach. It is possible, in the absence of profit data, to use revenue values in calculations to assess the effectiveness and attractiveness of small businesses.

T. V. Astashkina and A. S. Zotova consider economic attractiveness as a factor of increasing the potential of competitiveness, note its significant differences from investment attractiveness: taking into account social and innovative characteristics, intellectual capital and human resources ^[9]. There are publications in which the authors link the dynamics of the real gross regional product with the socio-economic attractiveness of the region, which they propose to evaluate the dynamics of the real one using an integral index, considering it a key indicator in models and forecasts of regional economic systems ^[2], the foreign trade attractiveness of regions is also mentioned in the scientific literature ^[11].

O. B. Bigdai, L. V. Kazakova distinguish three groups of factors of economic attractiveness of the agricultural sector and the agro-industrial complex for small forms of management: factors of mental and property and regulatory order, as well as market attractiveness ^[10]. Of interest is the methodology proposed by A. A. Dedov for comparative evaluation of the investment attractiveness of the production of various specific types of agricultural products ^[12], tested on materials for 2000-2013, which showed high investment attractiveness of sunflower, sugar beet and eggs production, low attractiveness of investments in the production of cattle meat and milk. This methodology is based on calculations of the need for land and labor resources, as well as the costs of servicing fixed assets to obtain 1 million rubles of products and profits from the production of specific types of agricultural products.

O. V. Bulavkina, Yu. L. Demidovich set themselves the task of "ranking various types of economic activities of small businesses in the region according to their degree of investment attractiveness" in order to "choose for investment those types of economic activities in small businesses that have the greatest comparative investment attractiveness" ^[13]. In their research, these authors compare different approaches to assessing the investment attractiveness of the industry, compare the methods used for these purposes, come to the conclusion that the question of the best way to assess the investment attractiveness of a type of activity for small businesses is open, and also note the absence in standard statistical reports of information necessary for the application of many techniques. According to the results of the study of the economic attractiveness of the activities of small enterprises, L. S. Trubnikova concludes that "the presented statistical data are insufficient to identify the weaknesses and strengths of the activities of small businesses" ^[14].

Using the data of official state statistics on small enterprises in various fields of activity, we will build and rank them by return on capital, revenue per employee and salary level, on the basis of which we will build a rating of the attractiveness of economic activities for small enterprises (Table 1).

Table 1 – Rating of attractiveness of economic activities for small and micro enterprises of the Russian Federation by the sum of places method, 2020

It is not difficult to see that none of the spheres of economic activity occupies the same positions in the ratings according to private criteria, for example, construction (code F) is in second place in terms of capital return, in terms of revenue per employee – in second, and in terms of wages – in seventh place. Therefore, an integral assessment is needed that would reflect the position of each field of activity in the rating based on the entire set of indicators. One of the approaches to such an assessment is based on the ranking of objects by the sum of the places they occupy in ratings based on private criteria. The data transformations carried out made it possible to determine that when using this methodological approach, the leading positions in the rating of economic attractiveness of fields of activity for small enterprises are occupied by trade and car repair (code G), construction (F) and ICT (J). The fourth and fifth places are occupied by financial and insurance activities (K), as well as scientific and technical activities (M) of small enterprises. In the penultimate place in terms of economic attractiveness is the activity in the field of health and social services (Q), as well as in the field of culture, sports, leisure and entertainment (R), administrative activity closes the rating (N). However, the simplicity of the sum of places method is associated with disadvantages highlighted in publications ^[16]. Since each of the rating methods gives only indicative results, it seems appropriate to use different approaches and study the stability of the obtained estimates.

When processing statistical data on the work of small enterprises in the context of their activities (sections of OKVED2), we used approaches that were previously outlined in the published works of one of the authors of this article ^[17],[18]. The calculation results are presented in Table 2.

 Table 2 – Rating indicators of small and micro enterprises of the Russian Federation and rating numbers when using various methods of convolution of criteria for the attractiveness of their fields of activity, 2020

The values of indicators given in this table can be used not only for ranking and determining places, but also make it possible to operate with relative values obtained after standardization (rationing) in relation to the leaders for each attribute taken into account in the rating.  In this sense, the estimation by the method of determining the distance from a conditional reference object is of particular interest.

Based on the rating numbers, the positions of each section of the OKVED in the attractiveness rating for small enterprises were determined (Table 3).

Table 3 – Final rating of attractiveness of the spheres of economic activity of small and micro enterprises of the Russian Federation, 2020

Attention is drawn to the existing differences in the distribution of places when using different methods of criteria convolution, for example, the positions of real estate transactions (L) varies from 12 to 18; places of agriculture, forestry, hunting, fishing and fish farming (A), mining (B), administrative activities (N) they differ by 4 positions depending on the chosen method. To average the results and level out the impact of the choice of the ball rating method, the sum of average places according to private and integral criteria was calculated, on the basis of which the final ranking of economic activity spheres according to their attractiveness for small businesses was carried out.

Conclusion. The trade and repair of motor vehicles (G), construction (F), ICT (J) have the greatest economic attractiveness for small enterprises. Next in terms of attractiveness are the following areas of activity: financial and insurance (K), professional and scientific-technical (M), mining (B), manufacturing (C), water supply and waste disposal (E), transportation and storage (H). In the second half of the rating, the remaining spheres of economic activity are located, the places of which can be identified by the code based on the classifier ^[15]. It should be noted that the areas of hotel business and catering (I), leisure and entertainment (R), agriculture (A) they are not among the economically attractive ones and, therefore, taking into account that they are associated in the public consciousness with potentially possible areas of employment of labor and capital of small enterprises, it can be assumed that these industries need close attention when forming a small business development policy.