28 February 2012 Employers Movement

Ukraine’s Business Climate Improvement – Common Cause For Business Community And Government

Investments serve as an indispensible fuel for any economy and the less they come, the slower the economy evolves. At the moment, Ukraine is in a perilous situation: the growth rate of both foreign and domestic direct investments is far from meeting the business development goals. Ukraine, ranking 164^th in global economy freedom rating accounts for as little as 0.3 percent of the world’s investments total which clearly is not appreciated by both the business and the government.
 
Seeking to revert this negative trend, the corporate world is using urgent measures. The Federation of Employers of Ukraine and namely its President Mr. Dmitry Firtash has moved forward an initiative to join forces of the national business and the government towards improving Ukraine’s investment climate. In so doing Dmitry Firtash argues that “business is free of national affiliation. Once a business has created jobs in Ukraine, this is a Ukrainian business.” For this reason, a meeting of interested parties was decided to be convened in a trilateral format: employers, governmental officials and heads of diplomatic missions of European countries having the most active economic relations with Ukraine.
 
The urgency and topicality of the problem as well as the commitment to search approaches to its solution transpired in the superior level of the roundtable participants: the Employers Federation was represented by its President and all of his deputies, the voice of the government was the First Vice-Prime Minister Valeriy Khoroshkovsky and the State Customs Service Chairman Igor Kaletnik, the diplomatic corps was represented by ambassadors of eight countries plus the head of the representative mission of the European Commission in Ukraine.
 
The discussion tone was set by the keynote speech by Mr. Firtash. “Ukraine is not the only investment destination in the world,” said the employers’ leader. “Investors are like a barometer: when the right conditions are there, they will come. We would like to create an environment in which foreign companies will not think about what they lose as they exit Ukraine but rather what they gain if they enter Ukraine and do their business here.”
 
 The First Vice-Prime Minister, speaking next, supported the need for business deregulation in order to raise the country’s economic freedom rate. “I agree that the formal reduction of bureaucratic procedures will not decrease the level of bureaucrats’ interventions in business. I will work towards creating the conditions when a company may only be checked by a tax inspector provided though that he or she would have sufficient legal grounds for that. At the moment, there are 90 agencies in Ukraine that may do inspections of which 30 have the right to suspend companies’ business,” noted Mr. Khoroshkovsky.
 
European diplomats spoke about specific problems Western companies face in their business activity in Ukraine and stressed that the government’s success in tackling them will determine the country’s investment image tomorrow. A common theme voiced by most of the speakers was a suggestion that prospective investors will judge Ukraine and its attractiveness for investment by how foreign companies working here assess the country’s business environment.
 
Summarizing the discussion, Mr. Firtash suggested that the Federation of Employers be in the future used as a platform for pursuing a dialog with the government, and that an interim meeting be convened at the end of the year to assess the progress in addressing the priority challenges highlighted at the roundtable.