Analysis, parliament

How to employ more than 640 thousand people with disabilities and effectively spend UAH 1 billion? The right to work is enshrined in Article 43 of the Constitution of Ukraine. Yet, it is not equally available to everyone. Millions of Ukrainians are unsuccessfully trying to get a job. For people with disabilities the life is even harder. Most of the doors in our country remain closed for them.

The war for talent goes on worldwide. Educated and hardworking people are the basis of prosperity for any nation state. Training in the best institutions provides more career opportunities. It costs more, too. However, in order to invest in education students and their parents need to understand what they are paying for. The new law created the new rules for evaluating the real cost for services in higher education.

The parliamentarians again suggested the constructs, composed of fuzzy rules of the basic law referring to "the acts of the Cabinet of Ministers" and "procedures established by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine"... this suggests the lobbyists of various support schemes for certain companies will again receive formal approval from the Antimonopoly Committee, but no one will properly analyze the impact of such support on the competition.

Millions of students and their parents, who are about to enter the labour market, are expecting fundamental changes in the education system. In fact, higher education system, just like the other areas, needs its own Revolution of Dignity.

Anticorruption and lustration are the top issues of this year's election campaign. All the candidates talk about them. Most voters want to hear such talks. Do they mean the same thing? How do presidential candidates see these changes, so desired by voters, and how will they implement these, according to their pre-election programs?

The activities of the Party of Regions for the last two months included the evasion of the responsibility, inert position, focus on the group interests, desire for revenge and broadcast of the Russian messages. All these will unavoidably bring the party to the bottom of impassable 5% barrier in snap parliamentary elections.

Unreadiness to join the EU, Russian annexation of Crimea and rocking separatist sentiments in eastern regions, Western unhasting measures to protect Ukraine forced presidential candidates to clearly articulate their foreign policy priorities.

In less than 3 months the representative of the new government of Ukraine has recognized the correctness of estimates of Ukrainian budget expenditures made previously by ‘Open Society’ Foundation.

‘Dzerkalo Tyzhnya’ newspaper as of 14 February 2014 published the ‘Open Society’ Foundation’s article on Ukraine’s national budget. The article titled “The Budget Code of Ukraine: Financial Constitution or the Vinaigrette of Whims?” revealed inefficient parliamentary fiscal policies and explained why the Budget Code had frequently been a subject for change.

On January 31st, 2014, Ukrainian newspaper “Dzerkalo Tyzhnya” published an article titled “The Naked King – 2”, analyzing parliamentary parties’ promises to increase financial self-sufficiency of Ukrainian regions and reduce their dependence on the central budget. The article resulted from the monitoring parliamentary political parties in Verkhovna Rada of 7th convocation. The monitoring was done by “Open Society” Foundation with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy, USA (NED).

At the press-conference on 15 January 2014 experts on fiscal and economic policy Denis Chernikov (Laboratory for Legislative Initiatives) and Ivan Sikora (Open Society Foundation) made a presentation on estimation of costs of systemic risks in the draft 2014 Ukraine budget.