Romanian Journal of European Affairs (Sep 2015)
Ukraine in the WTO: Effects and Prospects
Abstract
Over 6 years have passed since Ukraine became a member of the WTO. The accession has had both positive and negative effects on the country’s economy. The process of accession took place in the absence of any definite economic development strategy. As a consequence, the national manufacturers were hurt in many respects. Ukraine acceded to the WTO on terms rather unfavourable for the country, with little to no regard for the opinions of experts and the business milieu. That resulted in losses for the most vulnerable sectors of Ukraine’s economy. Those are the industries which produce high value-added products, including machine building, consumer goods industry and food-processing. This goes to show that the country’s WTO membership was detrimental for the innovation-oriented industries involving high technologies. The branches of the real sector of the economy which produce low value-added products (such as agriculture, chemical industry, and metallurgy) fared better. Despite the patterns of poor judgment shown, there are certain positive effects of Ukraine’s WTO membership. Among them one can mention the possibility to conduct equitable dialogue with the country’s foreign trade partners, enhancement of competitive advantages of the major producers in the real sector, provision of incentives to harnessing new technologies, improvement of production quality in order to enhance the competitiveness on the global market. Ukraine’s experience shows that it is obviously necessary for Russia to make efforts in order to ensure that Russia’s WTO membership would advantage the national economy and the real sector entities. Russia’s WTO membership can give a great impetus to the country development, but only if relevant domestic reforms will adapt Russian economic and legislative institutions to the conditions of the WTO multilateral trade agreements.
