Issue № 82. October 2020

Sustainability of Social Enterprises as One of the Most Important Criteria for Support Effectiveness for Social Entrepreneurship in Russia

Natalia I. Bulygina — postgraduate student, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: ni.bulygina@yandex.ru

Natalia P. Ivashchenko — DSc (Economics), Professor, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: nivashenko@mail.ru

The article is devoted to the development of social entrepreneurship in Russia, namely, to the issues of support effectiveness for social entrepreneurship and sustainability of social enterprises after receiving such support. The publication reflects the results of the first stage of a study, which includes an analysis of enterprises sustainability that received support and have already completed the process of repaying the received loans. The second stage of the study contains the analysis of enterprises supported in later periods and partially continuing to pay their obligations; its results remain outside of the scope of this study. Social entrepreneurship remains an important and relevant way for Russia to solve or mitigate the most pressing social, economic and environmental problems that have not received sufficient attention from government agencies and commercial enterprises. Often such problems are not solved due to low economic potential or unprofitable known solutions. Nevertheless, social entrepreneurship is often able to offer non-trivial approaches that contribute to an increase in the well-being of the population and to reduce ineffective budget spending. The study analyzed the sustainability of projects supported by the Foundation “Nashe budushcheye” (“Our Future”) in the period 2008–2013, which went through a full funding cycle as of 2019. The purpose of the study was to determine the life of projects, as well as to assess the financial performance of companies in subsequent years (up to 2019) using the commercial database “Spark”. The analysis of projects was carried out in the context of composition and belonging to the corresponding organizational and legal forms. The results of the study showed that about half of the projects (47%) are still actively functioning in the framework of the chosen direction, their composition in terms of organizational and legal forms is quite stable over time, however, the composition of enterprises in terms of distribution by areas of activity varies from year to year. Hypotheses were made regarding the factors affecting the sustainability of social enterprises and their mission, and promising directions for further research were identified.

Keywords

Social entrepreneurship, social enterprises, financial support, support measures, specialized fund, interest-free loan.

DOI: 10.24411/2070-1381-2020-10103