Programmed

The Cabinet of Ministers has received a guarantee from Verkhovna Rada that it will not fall before the presidential elections. Last Wednesday the parliament has approved the government program for 2004 with 239 votes (the necessary number being 226). Recall that last year’s program was supported by 335 people’s deputies. On his way to this political victory, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych had to make quite a few promises. Six hundred new vacancies, 9.5% annual economic growth, and increasing net wages by 15% are now the cabinet’s major goals. However, the government has not given any tax or investment stimulus to achieve these results. On the other hand, lack of improvisation on the state’s part is good news. If everything goes smoothly, Ukrainian business will probably secure decent economic growth without considerable support by the cabinet. By the February results the GDP has grown by 11.5%. Now all we need is that there is no draught and prices in the global metals market remains stable for as long as possible.

Analyzing the results of implementing the previous program, Viktor Yanukovych took the liberty of not only paying compliments to his government but also admitting a number of mistakes. To be precise, the premier specified failures in four directions. First, the cabinet failed to correctly forecast the rate of the economic growth. Instead of the planned 6%, the economy has grown by 9.3%, with not everybody seeing this as good news. The energy sector is frightened most of all, since they base their production plans precisely on the government’s forecasts. Obviously, the growing economy requires more energy. Another front where the government faced a defeat was lack of any clear methodology of calculating the impacts of Ukraine entering the World Trade Organization. Viktor Yanukovych promised that this document would appear in the immediate future. The third sore subject for the cabinet was the food crisis. The premier believes that it resulted from the lack of market relations in this sphere. It is still unknown what are the plans regarding regional monopolists, though Prime Minister Yanukovych said this is not going to be administrative pressure. In conclusion, the premier admitted that his team has not yet done anything to protect Ukrainian companies’ abroad. Obviously he had in mind the case of the Donetsk-based ISD Company to purchase a Polish metallurgical complex.

Speaking about the shortcomings of his work, Viktor Yanukovych did not say anything as to when a single window registration principle will be introduced for small business and when independent commissions start to determine tariffs for natural monopolies. Though both ideas were included in the previous program, none of them has been realized as yet. The new program also does not mention them. However, the criticisms of the new program did not touch such details. Obviously the reason for this is that the deputies from both sides of the barricades did not study the document too thoroughly. Leader of the parliamentary majority Stepan Havrysh praised the government for its high rates of the GDP growth in the post-Soviet space, to which the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko responded immediately, stating that the Ukrainians’ wages are 1.5-2 time lower than those of the citizens of neighboring Belarus and Russia. This was in fact the end of the so-called discussion. The premier watched all this calmly. He has a hot six pre-election months ahead of him, and in the future he will have to frequently digress for pie-in-the-sky discussions. Perhaps the main thing is that the country is kept living and developing in spite of the situation in Ukraine’s big politics. Then the rates of economic growth described by the government have every chance to become reality.