WTO Membership: Strategic Course

Whether or not Ukraine should join WTO is no longer on the agenda, as the choice has been made. Now the problem is to have more advantages than disadvantages. It is necessary to make the most of WTO membership and reduce the anticipated negative consequences to a minimum. Such were the conclusions of a round table at the National Institute of Strategic Studies. Ukraine’s WTO membership was discussed as the Ukrainian President’s message to parliament was prepared. One of six reports of that message would be dedicated to Ukraine and WTO.

“We regard Ukraine’s accession to WTO in the context of this country’s European integration,” said NISS director Anatoly Halchynsky, setting the tone of the discussion. He voiced concern over the ministries and agencies focusing on economic problems stemming from WTO membership, while there was actually no official body responsible for socioeconomic consequences. Meanwhile, NISS experts predict that Ukraine’s WTO membership and mounting competition will cause certain national producers to lose the domestic market and go bankrupt. Yury Petrovsky, head of the Industrial Policy Ministry’s foreign economic contacts department, believed that exporting enterprises would be spared the sad lot, as they had long learned the rules of the world market game. As for the rest, the ministry had no universal remedy to help them, so that every such enterprise would have to rely on its own resources. Volodymyr Sydenko, senior research fellow with the National Academy’s Institute of Economic Prognostication, rejected the idea of “dragging” domestic enterprises to the competitive level. He felt sure that this should be done simultaneously with entering the world trade system. In addition, postponing Ukraine’s WTO membership would have far-reaching consequences. Mr. Sydenko said WTO is working on new multilateral regulatory rules and that this work would be completed toward the end of 2004. He noted that, should Ukraine fail to join the process, its national interests would suffer, for they would be simply ignored, and that a situation could develop in which Ukraine would have to conduct further negotiations in a new format. This could reduce to nil all previous arrangements and postpone Ukraine’s WTO membership till an indefinite date.

Ukrainian Premier Viktor Yanukovych recently reaffirmed Ukraine’s intention to join WTO in the first half of 2004. A regular meeting of the WTO working group participating in the bilateral talks with the Ukrainian delegation will be held February 25 in Geneva. This round of talks is preceded by Ukraine’s active diplomatic efforts aimed at WTO membership. In this context, the meeting between Premier Yanukovych and WTO Director General Supachai Panitchpakdi at the World Economic Forum in Davos should be mentioned. It was also there that Ukrainian Economy and European Integration Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky and Russian Economic Development Minister German Gref agreed on signing a kind of nonaggression pact, whereby Ukraine and Russia would not impose additional requirements on each other, regardless of which country would be the first to join WTO.