The best news of the week was bad news to hundreds of thousands, but precisely the sort of economic castor oil this country needs to get back on its feet. Deputy Premier for the Economy Serhiy Tyhypko announced that 300,000 ministerial employees will be pink-slipped by the end of the year. This will still leave the state bureaucracy more bloated than it was in 1991, when there were less than 200,000 ministerial employees all told, but it is a step in the right direction, especially if they come not out of science, education, and health care, but out of the bureaucracy of Mr. Tyhypko’s economic bloc and are accompanied by a reduction of the unnecessary regulatory functions they now carry out.
Much has been heard of late about the perennial topic of corruption in Ukraine. The truth is that nothing can be done about corruption when the very weight of the state structure is too heavy for society to support and thus forces those in a position to do so are forced to either demand bribes or steal. Nothing can be done about the shadow economy when the state structure is so large that economic agents cannot support it and enforcing so many regulations that nobody can fulfill them, thus forcing business to flee the tax-man into the shadows. Corruption is not so much a cause of this country’s problems as an effect of them. Nothing can be done about it until its causes are addressed. And for precisely the wrong reason (pleasing the EBRD to get yet more loans), for once the government has announced its intention to do precisely the right thing. If handled properly, Mr. Tyhypko’s announced measure could be the first real move against the corruption that every resident of this country knows close up and personally. But then, hoping that the pink slips will go where they should might be too much. More likely everything will be done to rescue the redundant and declare the truly redundant vital. Those of us who have been here awhile are used to it. The problems is where it is all leading to...






