Last week’s historic achievement was as important as the sale of the Kryvorizhstal Steel Mill. The Ukraine-EU summit announced that Ukraine will be granted market economy status. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in his statement, “The future of Ukraine is to be with Europe. Today we are building this future in concrete stages: market economy status, membership in the WTO, the likely signing of a free trade area agreement....Ukraine is a strong partner of Europe,” Barroso said in conclusion. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is also convinced that relations between Ukraine and the EU “will become even stronger.” As the leader of the country that holds the EU presidency this year, he assured those present, “You can be sure that such countries as Great Britain will be your partners on your way to a free future and the European Union.” The joint statement issued at the summit notes that European Union leaders welcome the European Commission’s assessment of the way Ukraine has fulfilled the technical criteria needed for being recognized as a market economy.
The Ukrainian leadership also highly appraised the summit. President Viktor Yushchenko said that the Kyiv summit did the main thing last Thursday: it made a clear-cut political decision to grant Ukraine market economy status. The president told journalists that it may take one or two more months to complete the required technical procedures. The EU praised the “great progress that the Ukrainian side has made in its homework concerning joining the WTO.” “We note, however, that parliament still has to pass several important legislative documents to finally settle this subject in legal terms,” the president said.
Nobody in Ukraine has given a negative assessment of this country’s latest progress in its relations with the rest of the world. Naturally, business circles have approved the market economy decision. “Granting Ukraine market economy status undoubtedly means boosting Ukraine’s image and investment attractiveness. This means not only removing trade restrictions, increasing foreign trade turnover, and revitalizing business. This status opens up good opportunities for new investments. It is in fact the first step toward WTO membership,” says Volodymyr Khlyvniuk, chairman of the board of the Finance and Credit Bank. In his view, the summit’s final statement will have a positive effect on this country’s credit rating and, accordingly, on the profitability of foreign loans in the future. He also believes that exporters will now have broader opportunities to boost their exports, while the likelihood of antidumping investigation, widely resorted to earlier, will be greatly reduced.
At the same time, some of the euphoria from this achievement seems to have been generated by the simple fact that such high-profile events do not occur very often. Many people are now asking themselves a down-to-earth question: What does the average Ukrainian stand to gain from membership in the market club? Dmytro Sapunov, manager of the Komeks-Brok financial company, told The Day: “Granting market economy status is, above all, further proof that the changes that have taken place in the past 15 years in our country are irreversible. At the same time, the Ukrainian man in the street should not expect any radical changes because this status is of a symbolic rather than practical nature. This is not an achievement but only a signal that we have reached a certain level. Nothing special is going to happen in this connection. We have been working to this end, and now somebody has appreciated this. The surprising thing is that if such an event had occurred in an ‘old’ market-economy country, this would have affected the stock market the next day: shares would have sky-rocketed. But in our country it’s all peace and quiet. This means that practically nobody in the world, except for us, has noticed this event.”
