Legal Environment
Since the late 1990s, the government has pledged to reduce the number of government agencies, streamline the regulatory process, create a legal environment to encourage entrepreneurs, and enact a comprehensive tax overhaul. Outside institutions — particularly the International Monetary Fund — have encouraged Ukraine to quicken the pace and scope of reforms and have threatened to withdraw financial support. But reforms in some politically sensitive areas of structural reform and land privatizations are still lagging.
On June 24, 2010 Ukraine's Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Hryshchenko signed an agreement on free trade with the European Free Trade Association (EFTA).
According to specialists, a double taxation avoidance treaty with Cyprus (signed in 1982 by the Soviet Union) has cost Ukraine billions of US dollars of tax revenues.
See also: 2008–2009 Ukrainian financial crisisRead more about this topic: Economy Of Ukraine
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or environment:
“We should stop looking to law to provide the final answer.... Law cannot save us from ourselves.... We have to go out and try to accomplish our goals and resolve disagreements by doing what we think is right. That energy and resourcefulness, not millions of legal cubicles, is what was great about America. Let judgment and personal conviction be important again.”
—Philip K. Howard, U.S. lawyer. The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America, pp. 186-87, Random House (1994)
“Modern mans capacity for destruction is quixotic evidence of humanitys capacity for reconstruction. The powerful technological agents we have unleashed against the environment include many of the agents we require for its reconstruction.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)