VAT revenues in Ukraine are undermined by numerous privileges and low tax compliance due to manipulations and/or outright fraud causing inadequate tax collection and high tax refunds claims. Besides, there are both strong concerns about the vulnerability of the VAT system to corruption and...

Public investment can both serve socially useful purposes and be growth enhancing, if sufficient levels are allocated efficiently and if budgeting is managed properly. Public investment in Ukraine has recently risen from low to sufficient levels. Private participation in investment for socially...

The paper comments on the composition of the expenditure side of the central state budget of Ukraine for 2004. It takes a closer look at possible expenditure risks contained, the priorities which are reflected in the expenditure changes for ndividual items, and the transparency and...

Within a standard gravity framework I explore the impact of country size and trade liberalisation on extensive and intensive margins of imports across broad categories of goods. This allows testing hypotheses from two distinct strands of the trade literature, i.e., vertical integration versus...

The 2004 Presidential election campaign has left a deep effect on the budget process 2004-2005, which came about in three steps: (1) In the course of amending the 2004 budget, privatization receipts were misused to finance higher minimum pension payments, raising net public liabilities in the...

Elements of the institutional framework, i.e., the rules and regulations of the economy and the institutions that enforce them, are the main long-run criteria for private investment decisions. In particular, it is openness to trade and transparency that increase the chances of enhancing domestic...

Recent panel studies have found relatively high point estimates for the elasticity of ag-gregate price measures with respect to productivity in (former) transition economies, while other studies report price-productivity elasticity estimates to depend positively on average productivity in the...

The Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis – i.e. that real exchange rates between each pair of countries increase with the tradables sector productivities ratio between these countries, and decrease with their non-tradables sector productivities ratio – has been one of the most prominent frameworks...