You're reading: Yanukovych hopes for positive trends to continue in economy in 2013

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has said that he expects that official statistics will show that the country retained its economic growth in 2012.

The president said this in an interview with the analytical magazine “Ukraine and the World in 2013. Global Agenda,” a joint project of New York Times News Service & Syndicate and Segodnya Multimedia.

“We hope to maintain the positive trends in 2013, despite all of the possible external challenges,” Yanukovych said.

He said Ukraine was constantly monitoring the situation in the world and looking for the means to protect its domestic economy. In particular, a lot of attention is being paid to the stability of the situation in the macroeconomic sector.

Among the important factors in minimizing the negative effects of the global crisis on Ukraine, the president described the growth of domestic demand and improvement of the Ukrainian economy’s resistance to external risks by stimulating business activities and holding reforms.

“The international experience and above all the experience of our neighbors, shows that only a modernized economy can provide a stable growth rate,” Yanukovych said.

He said that to achieve this, the government has been implementing a program of economic reform designed until 2014. The president said the further progress of reforms and their stimulating effect on the rate of economic growth could produce real GDP growth in 2013 at 3.4%.

According to Yanukovych, during the modernization and the implementation of the economic reform, the government will focus primarily on creating the conditions for economic growth by keeping inflation low, ensuring the stability of public finances, a stable financial system, and forming a system of maximal assistance to business, as well as upgrading infrastructure and basic sectors of the economy.

In addition, the president said that Ukraine has been conducting a policy of reducing the tax burden on business since 2011 in order to stimulate the country’s economic activities. According to Yanukovych, a decrease in the income tax rate by two percentage points will increase the resources of enterprises by more than UAH 5 billion a year.

“This is an additional resource that can be used for expansion and the modernization of production, creating more jobs, which is especially important in difficult economic conditions,” the head of state said.

As reported, in 2012 the government foresaw the GDP growth of 3.9% compared to 5.2% in 2011. However, today various expert estimates of Ukraine’s GDP growth vary from zero to 0.5-0.7% considering the falls seen in the third and fourth quarters.