Some economic old news

"Corruption is back," warned Yushchenko at a press conference recently.

My goodness. I wasn't aware it had left. Perhaps he meant it had just stepped back in after a restroom break.

Certainly PoR is going to spend no efforts reigning it in, but with, for example, RosUkrEnergo, the company has not gone back into the shadows, it never left and NSNU supported it in power as much as PoR does now.

More eyebrow-raising was how frank Stephen Pifer, former US Ambassador to Ukraine, was about corruption concerns. I do like it when my compatriots call things like they are. (also from Channel 5) As one might expect, the Economist Intelligence Unit also listed corruption at the top of its risk assessment for Ukraine.

Wait, I take that back. It may not be that corruption was absent during the orange tenure, but things are definitely going down, downhill. 

Of course the other big problem in 2007 is likely to be the price of energy. While SigmaBleyzer's most recent montly report is again bullish, the optimistic folks there couldn't strike quite so happy a note in a report on energy. Hopefully, they say, the $130 price to be charged next year will only slow down GDP growth by 2%.

Which brings us to another bit of old, old news. 

Remember Odesa-Brody?

This used to be an oil pipeline project with prospects to help Ukraine circumvent Russian supply/transit dominance in Western Europe. But recently all negotiations teetered and ultimately collapsed after some solid pushes from Russia. The project is now "sidelined indefinitely", which is a step down from the policy of repeatedly putting it off, in force for the last five years.

So that's one fewer non-Russian fuel conduit. And it strengthens Putin's hand nicely ahead of his first visit to Ukraine in two years.

Here's Hoping WTO Entry Will Be An Exception

In guardedly positive news, all the necessary papers for joining the WTO have been signed. All that's left is agreement with Kyrgyzstan, and both Nasha Ukrayina and the Party of Regions are talking about getting in in the spring. Great! But the KP opinion article cited here expressed worries that more technicalities will arise to delay the process.