Pay of MPs

The proposal of Tymochenko to halve the salaries of MPs would reduce their pay to about 1000$ a month - which is low (for that money you can as well be an academic...) - hence, 'good and honest' people would have no more reason to be interested in running for office. In other words, you'd almost have to be an oligarch to be able to afford being an MP.

Such selection effects are potentially important if to be believe some recent research on

Brazil

http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4235.html

"Our main findings show that higher wages increases political competition and improves the quality of legislators, as measured by education, type of previous profession, and political experience in office. In addition to this positive selection, we find that wages also affect politicians’ performance, which is consistent with a behavioral response to a higher value of holding office."

the US

http://mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/jeea_2_2-3_193_0.pdf

"The empirical results are weakly encouraging to the view that pay rates of politicians affect behavior of this sample of politicians either by changing incentives or by altering the pool of politicians who put themselves forward for office."

and finland

http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp4235.html

"In this paper, we estimate the effect of pay for politicians on who wants to become a politician. We take advantage of a considerable 35 percent salary increase of Finnish MPs in the year 2000, intended to make the pay for parliamentarians more competitive. We have collected in- formation on the age, gender, education, and occupation of all parliamentary and municipal candidates in four parliamentary elections (1995, 1999, 2003 and 2007) and three municipal elections (1996, 2000 and 2004). Our preliminary results suggest that the salary increase would have increased the fraction of female parliamentary candidates with university-level education, while no effect is found for male candidates."

So, I'd advice Tymochenko to make it explicit that this reduction is conditional -i.e. that future good behavior will be rewarded by doubling or even tripling the salary- this would give both positive incentive effects and positive selection effects.