Our state wishes to be an active participant in international trade. Do the benefits of joining the WTO outweigh the costs? The potential benefits of WTO membership might be country-specific and not straightforward in any specific case. It is important to weigh off the benefits of WTO accession within the framework of timetable, law harmonization, and growth priorities. Would joining the WTO by 2010 be too great a shock for fragile economies and fledgling industries? Will the discipline of membership provide incentives that are not otherwise credible?
All New Independent States encounter problems with the implementation of GATT/WTO standards into national legal systems. How these states can harmonize their national legislation with the EU law in such spheres as foreign investment, intellectual properties, competition law, etc.? Another issue arises in the field of effective implementation of international instruments related to business transactions, financing, and dispute resolution. What are the most effective steps to be taken by the legislative and executive bodies of the states in order for these instruments to be uniformly applied in agreement with international conventions?
By the middle of 1997 GDP was already some 7.5 percent lower than a year earlier. Ukraine has been unable to translate its macroeconomic stabilization into economic growth because of the slow pace of privatization and restructuring of industry, a growing trade deficit and problems of locating refinancing to cover current budget deficits and meet service payments on international debts. The slow pace of economic reform has led to greater pessimism within international financial institutions about Ukraine's ability, particularly during elections, to continue to push ahead with painful reform.
Social problems are another difficulty that will plague Ukraine during election year - wage arrears is at $2.6 billion and official unemployment continues to rise, now at 600,000. Only Russia and Kazakstan within the CIS have trade surpluses of exports over imports; Ukraine remains the country with the highest deficit ($3.7 billion). Russia provides approximately half of Ukraine's imports, a figure that has remained stable since the 1980s and reflects the dominance of energy transfers. If Ukraine is successful in establishing Azerbaijan as its main energy supplier, the projected income derived from transit charges to European customers of Azeri oil are likely to cover Ukraine's annual cost of imported energy and thereby have a major influence upon reducing Ukraine's trade deficit.
The Russian share of Ukraine's export market shows a different declining trend, having dropped by half in 1987-1997, now standing at only 30 percent. Ukraine's energetic search for new markets in Latin America, the Arab world and Southeast Asia is an attempt to find new markets for Ukrainian exports in the face of a decline in trade with the CIS, which is likely to continue. Foreign and defense The formal public presentation of the GUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) group as a sub-group of the Commonwealth of Independent States is an example of the direction in which the CIS is headed. The CIS already had three other sub-groups - the Russian/Belarusian union, the quadripartite Customs Union (Russia, Belarus, Kazakstan, Kyrgyzstan) and the Central Asian union (all the Central Asian states, excluding Turkmenistan). The GUAM group represents those states that have always sought to maintain Russia at a distance and opposed CIS supra-national structures. It is not ruled out that Uzbekistan, which increasingly has drawn closer to Ukraine within the CIS in its criticism of Russia, could also join GUAM.
The arrival of GUAM is significant because it signals that the CIS is, for all intents and purposes, a dying body badly in need of a life-support mechanism. The sixth anniversary of the CIS passed virtually unnoticed in the capitals of the CIS member-states. The man behind the creation of the CIS as an alternative to the USSR, former Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, described it as a "shell. Its decisions mean nothing. This organization has no prospects." President Kuchma applauded its role in peacefully dissolving the former USSR, but he believes that currently it merely serves as a "consultative forum." The decline of the CIS and the rise of GUAM is a reflection of the incompatibility of domestic state- and nation-building, which is being undertaken within most of the non-Russian states of the CIS, and attempts at close integration on the part of Russia and Belarus. Ukraine is de jure not even a member of the CIS, having never signed the charter. In December 1997 President Kuchma pointedly stated that "Every country has its own interests. Ours, for example, lie in Europe."
Without cutting off all ties to the CIS, Ukraine under President Kuchma seeks to accomplish three tasks. First, normalize relations with Russia. A major step was undertaken in this direction with the signing of the Russian-Ukrainian inter-state treaty in May 1997. But, both sides understand this treaty in different ways and Kyiv has not failed to notice that Russian President Boris Yeltsin only flew to Kyiv, shortly before the Madrid NATO summit, because Ukraine had successfully played the NATO card. The Russian leadership sees the treaty as a way of both restraining Ukraine's westward drift to Europe, as well as a means to cement a military alliance. Both Moscow and Miensk would like to see Ukraine join their fledging pan-Slavic union. Ukraine, on the other hand, sees such a union or military alliance as leading to a new Cold War because both would inevitably be anti-Western and anti-NATO.