EU experts who help Ukraine to reform the system of state aid call from countries of the former Eastern bloc, who were involved in the establishment of similar systems in their countries, the Team Leader of the EU Project "Support to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine for Enforcing State Aid Rules", Stefan Sabau, has said at a web conference at Gorshenin Institute.
"Today, the EU project involves 15 senior experts who are working on amendments to the law on state aid and developing compliance criteria. And since, I would like to repeat this again and again, state aid is a very complex and comprehensive sector, we had to choose the experts who would understand the peculiarities of state aid in different sectors of the economy," Sabau said.
According to him, representatives of the countries of the former Eastern bloc were best suited for this purpose.
"They immediately understand the challenges that Ukraine is facing," he said.
"What is happening in Ukraine now is what took place in Romania (Sabau is a citizen of this country- ed. note), which is transition from a centralized model of economy to a market economy. And we must understand that a real market is free and competitive. A competitive market is a market with minimal state intervention in which participants must freely provide goods and services of top quality at a low price. The state can only intervene if the market cannot provide adequate goods and services, which in our terminology is called market failure. Therefore, the agreement on the functioning of the EU generally bans state aid for the obvious reason that it distorts competition. But as everyone understands that there are still situations when the state must intervene in the economy, and state aid is allowed provided certain goals and criteria are met," he said.