Analyzing Protest in Ukraine

An interesting study analyzing protest in Ukraine can be found here

Priest Politicians

"The upcoming local elections will be memorable for a number of reasons. One of them is the strong presence of the clergy among the contestants."

Unfinished Construction

Some impressive numbers...

"According to the Construction Ministry, as of June this year, there were more than 4,300 unfinished construction objects in this country, including 2,894 apartment buildings."

Illegal Migrants

"KYIV, October 28 /UKRINFORM/. The Odesa border guards detained a herd of cows, the press service of the State Border Service of Ukraine reported.

A border detachment of the Pidhirne department of Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky district discovered the cows near the village. The cows were grazing in the field at a distance of two kilometers from the border with Moldova. There was no shepherd, but the tags were Moldovan. In total, 51 'border offenders' were detained. It was impossible to find the path by which the animals penetrated in Ukraine, because the rain washed away all traces. The owner of the cattle has not yet been found."

Ukrainian Turn-It-In?

The Ukrainian Ministry of Education wants to combat plagiarism: "Ukraine will create soon the Antiplagiat program helping to establish originality of yearly, bachelor's, master's, candidate's, doctoral and other academic works, Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk told a press conference Wednesday."

Corruption 2010

The latest corruption perception index of Transparency International is out. Ukraine does slightly worse than Moldova and Belarus and slightly better than Russia ( though these differences are unlikely to be significant). They have in common that they all score bad...

Silliest Statement of the Week

"Banks today are ready to restore mortgage lending. At the same time there should be state regulators, in particular, the state should act as a guarantor of any loans, including the mortgage ones," the expert said.

Expert????

If the state guarantees all the loans, I plan to start a bank and issue loans to everybody!

Sending Students Abroad

Ukraine plans to send more students abroad using state funds according to this news report.

"We decided to send our 300 students to study in the best European and world universities next year at the expense of state funds. In a year, we will send 3,000 students," Mykola Azarov underscored.

Good students already can get scholarships so there is little need for the Ukrainian government to spend money on this, if there is money it would better spend any such extra money on developing Ukrainian universities.

Let us hope this announcement is just an empty political promise.

About 50% save under the mattress

According to this poll, 47% of Ukrainians keep their savings at home or in a safe.

This is not surprising as banks are very much distrusted in Ukraine - but anybody who would be able to 'mobilize' these savings would get rich and do Ukraine and the Ukrainians a great service.

Business Opportunity?

The Frishberg Law company has some business opportunities on its website which are worth browsing through (look at the right side) - this one asks 50 million $ for, I quote: "Project is on the stage of getting permission for construction". Good Luck!

Go Forth and Multiply

or thy shall be taxed! Some MPs are indeed arguing to (re)introduce the childlessness tax.

It's Rare but It Happens

The Israeli Lottery drew twice in one month the same set of 6 numbers!

http://www.kyivpost.com/news/guide/guidenews/detail/86612/

Ukrainian Children

can be bought cheaper than Ukrainian kidneys - according to this news item, a Ukrainian women tried to sell her 2 year old daughter for $12500. Scroll down for the price of kidneys...

Rent-Seeking Lawyers...

An interesting niche

"The Law Firm "Moskalenko & Partners" announces a seminar for borrowers with problem credits "THE ANTICREDIT: ways to get rid or reduce burden of a problem loan".

The following topics will be highlighted at the seminar:
15 legal ways to reduce the credit burden: pros and cons, potential risks, case-law practice.
Popular ways to avoid property confiscation.
Top 10 most spread violations of law by banks. The relevant issues of court enforcement proceedings on credits’ collection.
Case-law practice: annulment of credit and pledge agreements, amendments and changes to agreements in a court process.

Collection of problem loans and avoidance of such collection at all of its stages (pre-judicial, judicial, executive) is one of the main practices of the Law firm "Moskalenko & Partners" in 2009-2010. Lawyers of our firm have a great experience in suing credit contracts, mortgage contracts, guarantee contracts, changing conditions and terms of contracts in a court process, suing notary endorsements etc. In particular, we received an unique decision, which came into force, in favor of a borrower who had been sued by the bank for the amount of 2,3 million UAH."

An interesting example of the point in this article which argues that the more lawyers a country has, the lower its growth (though the empirics is not entirely convincing.

Ukrainian Kidney's

Cost about $100000 to $200000 according to this article


An interesting economic perspective on this 'market' can be found here

Audit

The US audit companies have finished auditing the previous government - some results are mentioned here

In fact, the outcome is not that bad, if you ask me - it seems only a small part of the budget is 'misused' and in several cases, the misuse that is mentioned in this article is not that outrageous and could/would as well have been done by the current government.

Of course, no misuse would be even better...

Ukraine for Harvard MBA's

Harvard Business School uses Ukraine in one of its Case studies - the topic: corruption - see the description here. For many Harvard MBA's, this case is probably how they get to know Ukraine...

Upcoming Capital Controls?

According to this news, Tihipko thinks Ukraine might introduce capital controls.

Before making a decision, it would be good if he would take a close look at the research on this topic like

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2009/wp0930.pdf

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/sebastian.edwards/capflows_chile.pdf


http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1141633

Dress Code

The Ukrainian government's dress code makes headlines internationally - see for example the WSJ


Economists have done some work on the pay offs of beauty, like this paper but I haven't found any papers yet that try to estimate the effect of dress code on business success of firms - if I do, I'd write a column on it!

I Hope This Is a Translation Error

"She said that if the government claims there is a decline in inflation, it should back this up with data about the growth of consumption in the country, and the invigoration of lending in the real sector of the economy."

This sentence is bizar, to say the least...and does not add to the credibility of the current opposition

Subsidies Anyone?

The government is handing out subsidies for the planting of sugar beets - 500 UAH per hectare. Anybody knows why this should be subsidized?

Stereotypes and Ukraine

Interesting maps on stereotypes including Ukraine!

The New NRC Rankings Are Out

For anybody with an interest on doctoral education in the US: the new NRC rankings are out! - the economics rankings can be found here