Policy comment / March 2018
One country – two economic systems? The ‘partial reforms’ experiment in Belarus
by Kamil Kłysiński (OSW)
“On December 22, 2017, Belarusian president Alexandr Lukashenka signed two important decrees: the first ‘On the Development of Entrepreneurship’ and the second ‘On the Development of the Digital Economy’. The degrees foresee an unprecedented opening of the private sector in Belarus, and give strong legal and tax incentives to the IT sector. They are the latest expression of a path that Belarus has taken over the past few years, in the course of which the IT sector has become a priority issue in economic policy.
At the same time, Belarus has firmly neglected recent calls by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to restructure its state-owned sector. The Belarusian authorities have thus sent conflicting signals by building islands of a modern economy based on high-tech technologies, a developed service sector and private entrepreneurship, while still sustaining the old ineffective economic model of command-and-control.(…)”
*
Did you like it? Please take a look at our previous policy comments!