Improving Agricultural Fiscal Policy In Ukraine

Agriculture's importance to the economy in Ukraine is both deep and diverse. Agriculture is one of the Ukrainian economy's key sectors, accounting for 11 percent of GDP and 22 percent of total employment. Together with the food processing industry, its contribution to GDP and employment increases to 20 percent and 28 percent, respectively. This paper evaluates the past and current agricultural fiscal policies in Ukraine. The main findings and messages include the following: Despite increased fiscal spending, the agricultural sector in Ukraine continues to perform below its potential; a supportive environment for agricultural development should be created; fiscal spending needs to be shifted away from subsidies, to the programs most relevant to the objectives of public support; and the quality of growth-enhancing investments needs to be improved.

This study provides a review of the food and agricultural sector in Ukraine. It assesses the current status of the food and agricultural sector with special reference to the agricultural policy regime and the form and level of government support to the sector. The paper reviews the sector's readiness to compete on open global markets for food and agricultural products. Given the importance and sensitivity of the food and agriculture sector in the country, the report highlights a number of critical issues for the Ukrainian government to address. The report goes beyond the narrower focus of the agricultural policies and reviews the status of current rural physical and social infrastructure and issues of rural poverty. The Executive Summary highlights policy recommendations for Ukrainian policymakers, while the individual chapters provide technical analysis on key policy issues.

This study provides a review of the food and agricultural sector in Ukraine. It assesses the current status of the food and agricultural sector with special reference to the agricultural policy regime and the form and level of government support to the sector. The paper reviews the sector's readiness to compete on open global markets for food and agricultural products. Given the importance and sensitivity of the food and agriculture sector in the country, the report highlights a number of critical issues for the Ukrainian government to address. The report goes beyond the narrower focus of the agricultural policies and reviews the status of current rural physical and social infrastructure and issues of rural poverty. The Executive Summary highlights policy recommendations for Ukrainian policymakers, while the individual chapters provide technical analysis on key policy issues.

The vast majority of the world's poorest households depend on farming for their livelihood. During the 1960s and 1970s, most developing countries imposed pro-urban and anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Although progress has been made over the past two decades to reduce those policy biases, many trade- and welfare-reducing price distortions remain between agriculture and other sectors as well as within the agricultural sector of both rich and poor countries. Comprehensive empirical studies of the disarray in world agricultural markets first appeared approximately 20 years ago. Since then the OECD has provided estimates each year of market distortions in high-income countries, but there has been no comparable estimates for the world's developing countries. This volume is the first in a series (other volumes cover Africa, Asia, and Latin America) that not only fill that void for recent years but extend the estimates in a consistent and comparable way back in time--and provide analytical narratives for scores of countries that shed light on the evolving nature and extent of policy interventions over the past half-century. 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Europe's Transition Economies' provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the economies of Eastern Europe and Central Asia that are transitioning away from central planning. The book includes country and subregional studies of the ten transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007, of seven other large member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and of Turkey. Together these countries comprise over 90 percent of the Europe and Central Asia region's population and GDP. Sectoral, trade, and exchange rate policies in the region have changed greatly since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but price distortions remain. The new empirical indicators in these country studies provide a strong evidence-based foundation for evaluating policy options in the years ahead.

This report monitors agricultural policy developments in Brazil, Bulgaria, China, India, Romania, Russia, South Africa and Ukraine following the same approach applied to OECD countries, providing a common benchmark for evaluating reforms and for facilitating international dialogue.

The Rehabilitation of Degraded Agricultural Lands (RDAL) project by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in partnership with the Government of Sri Lanka through the Ministry of Mahaweli Development and Environment (MMDE), aims to encourage the use of sustainable land management practices in agricultural lands in the central highlands of Sri Lanka. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s role in this project involves developing innovative financing mechanisms to promote Sustainable Land Management (SLM). In order to achieve this, IUCN has formulated an approach which is laid out in this report the Innovative Financing Mechanisms for Promoting Sustainable Land Management (SLM). Developing innovative financing mechanisms that are tailored to the environmental, economic and socio-cultural context of paddy, vegetable, home garden and tea farmers in the central highlands of Sri Lanka will enable and promote the use of SLM practices which in turn will contribute to the rehabilitation and prevention of further degradation of these lands. This report is divided into two main parts where the first part is a general guideline to aid the identification and development of potential IFMs for sustainable land management in agricultural lands in Sri Lanka, and the second part outlines the process followed by IUCN to identify potential IFMs for the RDAL project.

This report is the 31st in the series of OECD reports that monitor and evaluate agricultural policies across countries, and the 6th report to include all 35 OECD countries, the six non-OECD EU Member States and a set of emerging economies.

One of Europe's old nations steeped in history, Ukraine is today an undisputed independent state. It is a democracy and has transformed into a market economy with predominant private ownership. Ukraine's postcommunist transition has been one of the most protracted and socially costly, but it has taken the country to a desirable destination. Åslund's vivid account of Ukraine's journey begins with a brief background, where he discusses the implications of Ukraine's history, the awakening of society because of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the early democratization, and the impact of the ill-fated Soviet economic reforms. He then turns to the reign of President Leonid Kravchuk from 1991 to 1994, the only salient achievement of which was nation-building, while the economy collapsed in the midst of hyperinflation. The first two years of Leonid Kuchma's presidency, from 1994 to 1996, were characterized by substantial achievements, notably financial stabilization and mass privatization. The period 1996–99 was a miserable period of policy stagnation, rent seeking, and continued economic decline. In 2000 hope returned to Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko became prime minister and launched vigorous reforms to cleanse the economy from corruption, and economic growth returned. The ensuing period, 2001–04, amounted to a competitive oligarchy. It was quite pluralist, although repression increased. Economic growth was high. The year 2004 witnessed the most joyful period in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution, which represented Ukraine's democratic breakthrough, with Yushchenko as its hero. The postrevolution period, however, has been characterized by great domestic political instability; a renewed, explicit Russian threat to Ukraine's sovereignty; and a severe financial crisis. The answers to these challenges lie in how soon the European Union fully recognizes Ukraine's long-expressed identity as a European state, how swiftly Ukraine improves its malfunctioning constitutional order, and how promptly it addresses corruption.

This book takes forward our understanding of agricultural input subsidies in low income countries.

Recently, monetary authorities have increasingly focused on implementing policies to ensure price stability and strengthen central bank independence. Simultaneously, in the fiscal area, market development has allowed public debt managers to focus more on cost minimization. This “divorce” of monetary and debt management functions in no way lessens the need for effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy if overall economic performance is to be optimized and maintained in the long term. This paper analyzes these issues based on a review of the relevant literature and of country experiences from an institutional and operational perspective.