Economist names government’s most serious errors in 2017

Because of the low quality of this document, the country failed to receive a $1 bln tranche of the IMF and related EUR 600 million from the EU, he told Glavred.

"The most blatant mistakes of the government are: over-scale economic populism around social assistance, which has already led to an inflation rate twice higher than planned for 2017 and the continued devaluation of the hryvnia at a higher rate than it was budgeted for this year," the expert noted.

According to the expert, another wrong step was freezing the issuance of licenses to private gas and oil producing companies, as well as companies-developers of quarries with different natural resources.

Read alsoUAH rate to "stabilize" in January: Groysman"...the failure of the pension reform, which was reduced only to changes in the conditions for retirement and changes in the conditions for calculating pensions, while the pension system remained the way it was before, that is a single-level solidary pension [...] the absence of tax reform, customs reform, administrative and economic reform as well as the reform of the public administration system," Novak said.

The economist also considers it erroneous to level out decentralization reform, "which only reduced to changing the administrative boundaries of communities, granting greater powers to local authorities, but with no increase in their own incomes."

"...the structure of the revenue part of the consolidated budget has remained unchanged: as before, 80% of revenues (taxes) come directly to the central budget, and only 20% of revenues (taxes) remain for all local budgets. Then the funds from the central budget are allocated for the regions, which is done in the manual mode. Such system of inter-budgetary relations has been in place throughout all the years of Ukraine’s independence, and this is the main thing that needs to be changed with the help of the appropriate budget reform," Novak said.