SOME ASPECTS OF IMPROVING THE EFFICIENCY OF CRIMINAL LAW IN THE SPHERE OF ECONOMY: DEVELOPING THE CATEGORIES

The article examines the concept and qualifying features of business activity as an inter-branch law category based on the theory of civil, business, criminal, administrative and financial law. The authors stress the importance of finding efficient solutions for optimizing the basic concept of entrepreneurial activities to eliminate the possibility of using criminal prosecution to exert pressure on entrepreneurs and to solve business disputes. In its turn, this will allow to eliminate ungrounded prosecution for non-performance of a contract in the cases caused by usual entrepreneurial risks. The authors argue that the legislatively defined criteria of entrepreneurial activities (their independence, involved risk, profit orientation) are not sufficient and should be described in more detail, specifically, by identifying the type of business activity and the entrepreneurial character of the risk, disclosing the systematic character of making a profit and legally defining activities not recognized as entrepreneurship. Besides, as the requirement of legitimization has been eliminated from the legal definition of entrepreneurial activities, the authors show that it is necessary to have some legislative provisions for the specific cases when physical persons can be involved in entrepreneurial activities without the state registration as individual entrepreneurs. They also state that a favorable business and investment climate and business conditions can be achieved, on the one hand, by state stimulation of legal entrepreneurial activities and, on the other hand, by establishing the well-grounded criteria for criminalizing actions in the sphere of entrepreneurship. The authors also stress the importance of further research of the analyzed concept for identifying the crime-defining features and for a better classification of crimes in the sphere of entrepreneurship.