You're reading: Yanukovych: Realistic to improve Ukraine’s position in world competitiveness rating

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych believes that it is possible to improve Ukraine's positions in the world competitiveness rating.

"The aim of Ukrainian economic reform is very ambitious – our plans foresee an improvement in Ukraine’s ranking in a business climate rating by at least 40 positions and in a world competitiveness rating by at least 10 positions," he said at a meeting with German businessmen in Berlin on Monday.

According to Yanukovych, an average pace of GDP growth registered of 5% and more per year will be considered "a key indicator of the success of reform and the efficiency of the government’s performance in that direction." In the president’s opinion, that task is quite feasible.

Yanukovych also said that large-scale economic reform in Ukraine is impossible without simultaneous reform of the political system, as well as drastic anticorruption measures and enhancement of transparency in the authorities’ activity.

Yanukovych stressed that when his political team came to power in Ukraine, a real war on corruption began.

"Information about the arrest of high-ranking corrupt officials appears almost every day," he said. "It doesn’t make me very happy, but this news means that the authorities have started punishing corruption and cleansing themselves of the corrupt shadows inherited from the former authorities, whose hands, they claimed, never ever stole anything."