Monitoring new government‚Äôs agenda

Dátum: 23.10.2005

New government’s Program was approved on February 4, 2005. It is a general document that lists the government’s priorities and it does not contain specific targets as well as specific steps. Rather it is a philosophy of the new government, as admitted by PM Yulia Tymoshenko.

The Program declares that efforts of the Government will be put to:

  • reduce poverty;
  • create safe and comfortable living conditions for people;
  • fight crime and corruption;
  • support young families, socially unprotected families and families having many children;
  • gradually provide with "social" flats those who need them;
  • create new jobs and possibilities of realization of each person‚Äôs talents;
  • realize European choice.

Program describes briefly such reforms as reform of education, health, judicial, administrative reforms, etc. PM ordered to design roadmaps for each reform to respective Ministries. It is clear that in February Ministries were occupied by staff changes and re-organization that did not leave much room for policy design. The statements of some Ministries give a notion that they are not really prepared to immediate actions, that is, concrete policy options have not been designed in advance by the team of the President1.

During the first weeks most statements of the new government were concerned with re-organization of structure of Ministries, transparency of government’s actions, fight with corruption at all levels, re-privatization2, oil issues3 and "finding" money for budget.4

1) For example, Ministry of Economics has offered public discussions of Administration reform. The questions announced for the discussion show absence of clear understanding about specific actions within this reform.

2) The re-privatization of state-owned assets that were sold illegally was one of the key themes in Viktor Yushchenko’s election campaign. Today the government is actively discussing re-privatization of Krivorizhstal as well as other companies.

On 14 February 2005 the Management Through Public Intercourse Agency and the International Centre for Policy Studies. organized a roundtable called "Re-Privatization: Costs and Benefits". Representatives of the central government, the Verkhovna Rada, foreign embassies, and business associations, as well as independent experts and journalists from major media outlets took part in the event. They were generally negative about the idea of revisiting the results of Ukraine’s privatizations so far. Among the key drawbacks mentioned are the risk of undermining confidence in Ukrainian markets and a lack of formal criteria to decide which assets are suitable for re-privatization.

3) Conditions of paying VAT on oil imports became stricter (earlier delays in payments were allowed).

4) The government must fulfill large social obligations taken by the previous government. Thus, the government is seeking the ways to do it as there is in fact a budget dedicit in Ukraine in 2005. In particular, PM wants state monopolies like "EnergoAtom", "NaftoGas" and "Vugillya Ukrainy" to be more efficient.