P. Sheremeta: Even pessimistic forecasts lead to positive consequences of opening the European market for the domestic exporters

“Various institutions, including the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, have engaged into research and still continue researching an effect from opening of the European Union’s market. The forecasts are both pessimistic and optimistic and all of them actually lead to pluses. It is evident that the Ukrainian economy will receive new opportunities from this step, I will just say a range of volatilities – according to the pessimistic forecasts – an increase will make up 2% of GDP, according to the optimistic forecasts it is envisaged an increase by one third in Ukrainian export,” Pavlo Sheremeta emphasized.

According to him, optimistic forecasts have been made based on positive experience of Poland and other central European countries that account not only for opening of the European Union’s market, but huge domestic changes, structure reforms, being launched by Ukraine’s Government presently.

The head of the Ministry also added due to the autonomous trade preferences introduced by the European Union from April 23, leading branches of Ukrainian economy have already felt significant abolition of the customs duty.

“When we talk about manufactured goods, duties have been abolished for 95%, for a certain group of goods they have been partially reduced. When we talk about agricultural goods (I know the Verkhovna Rada pays interest to this area as a crucial sector of Ukraine’s economy), import duties in Europe have been abolished for almost 84% and respectively by 15% they have been decreased significantly, tariff quotes with a zero rate are applied,” Pavlo Sheremeta stressed.