The article assesses the effectiveness of state support policies for small businesses in conditions of federal budget deficit in the Russian Federation. The subject of the study is a methodology to assess the effectiveness of supporting small and medium-sized businesses. The purpose of the study is to develop a system to evaluate the effectiveness of state support for SMEs. The objectives of the study: to analyze the approaches to assess the effectiveness in Russia at large and abroad, to assess the effectiveness of state support measures for SMEs in Russia and abroad, to propose their own options for assessing the effectiveness of support measures, to present the practical application of the proposed methods. Research methodology: methods of system analysis, generalization, systematization, methods of statistical, dynamic, structural and comparative analysis. Research results: the article develops a system to evaluate the effectiveness of state support for small businesses, which includes several main indicators for evaluating the effectiveness (survival rate of recipients of state support by year; dynamics of average income; dynamics of the average number of employed; dynamics of the average amount of taxes paid by SMEs), as well as an algorithm to conduct an assessment based on a comparison of selected indicators for a group of SMEs that received support with indicators of small and medium-sized enterprises that were not participants in the relevant government programs. Using the proposed assessment system based on the statistical data of the Federal Tax Service of the Russian Federation, an analysis of the effectiveness of state support measures for SMEs in general and in the context of individual forms of support in the period 2019- 2022 was carried out. Based on the significant deviation of the selected indicators of SME recipients of support from the average values in the whole SME sector (and/or in relation to SMEs that did not receive support), a conclusion is made about the high efficiency of state support for SMEs. It is also established that the impact of various forms of state support on the functioning of SMEs is different.
