The reform plan of Ukraine’s coalition government-in-the-making has received mixed reviews from a team of Ukraine experts affiliated with the policy discussion website VoxUkraine.
We assign PASS to 3 sections out of 17, and CONDITIONAL PASS to 6 sections out of 17. We find that the draft does not have a coherent ideology and that many sections advocate Soviet style command economy approach to reforms, while only few sections address the structural causes of the problems in Ukraine.
The good news is that the team rates three of 17 sections as excellent, six as subject to improvement, five as “water” (or boilerplate), and only four as bad. That’s nine of 17 that are at least good enough. And those nine include law enforcement, national security, and energy independence (pass) as well as anticorruption, decentralization, regulation and competition policy, infrastructure and transportation, electoral reform, and ecology (conditional pass).
The bad news is that eight of 17 don’t pass muster, and, worse, these include such key sectors as judicial and financial reform (“water”) and agricultural, constitutional, and economic-growth reform (fail). If you believe that judicial reform underpins all the other reforms, then none of the reforms will take off without a fundamental restructuring of the courts. If, alternatively, you believe that economic growth is the sine qua non of many of the other reforms, then you’re likely to view the bad news as really, really bad.
Unlike the VoxUkraine team, Anders Aslund of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics believes the entire document is a disaster:
The draft coalition agreement even reminded me of reading Leonid Brezhnev’s speech at the 26th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1981. This is not a reform program but an old-style bureaucratic Soviet document for the preservation of the old system. Such a conservative document will never bring reform. There is no declaration of will or strategy. The document does not even start with a set of goals but with a bureaucratic laundry list.
Aslund and VoxUkraine can’t both be right: the document cannot be both wholly conservative and partially reform-oriented. Their disagreement may be rooted in the fact that Aslund is assessing the document primarily from the economic point of view, while the VoxUkraine team looked at all its dimensions.
Be that as it may, political realists might interject by arguing that no (democratic) government ever adopts or promotes fully consistent reform programs or implements all its stated goals. Seen in this light, the fact that a coalition of five squabbling parties managed to produce a document that is more than half passable is quite an impressive achievement. And were Ukraine actually to introduce serious reforms in nine of 17 sectors, we should, once again, probably thank the gods.
My own sense is that, while many of the reforms do go together and need either to be passed simultaneously in order to work or depend on some one key sector to work, many are also discrete. I can agree that judicial and constitutional reform underpins anticorruption and electoral reform, but I’m not sure that building an effective army (national security) and constructing infrastructure and transportation depend (as much or at all) on good courts. America, for instance, became a regional power and expanded its railroads westward in the second half of the nineteenth century, and yet its courts were highly deficient. Which is only to say that much progress can probably be made in the nine areas that get a pass or conditional pass even without equal progress in the eight areas that fail.
There are two more upsides to the coalition document.
First, it’s an extensive list of all the reforms the coalition has in mind. As a result, it’s open to evaluation by such groups as the VoxUkraine team. Whether or not the governing coalition actually listens to criticism is another thing. But, at the very least, Western states and Ukrainian civil society will be able easily to monitor the government’s progress and make aid conditional on forward movement in neglected areas. As the VoxUkraine team says:
Interestingly, the best sections are those on Energy Independence, National Security, and Law Enforcement, which are the key areas for the survival of the sovereignty of Ukraine. Some other good areas are based on the EU directives (see ecology, e.g.). The less pressing areas offer a more depressing picture. This gives support to the argument that the change for the better in Ukraine can come only because of the external pressure to the state. The sections that are supposed to respond to domestic challenges such as social sphere, public utility services, and healthcare are low quality.
Second, the document assigns deadlines to the accomplishment of individual reforms. That, too, will enable Western states, experts such as Aslund, and Ukrainian citizens to keep track of government progress.
All in all, the coalition document has probably earned a conditional pass. That’s not great, compared to the ideal requirements of experts. Compared to what Ukraine’s previous governments have accomplished in the past 25 years, however, it may be borderline amazing.
And that may be the final bit of good news: Ukrainians now demand more of their government. Barely good enough just isn’t good enough anymore. You can thank the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity for that.
