BY
Integration – the third hurdle facing Ukrainian (and European) companies
applying to the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement. Along with the
legal/regulatory and monetization hurdles, this will prove more difficult for
Ukrainian companies as the Ukrainian government has slowed the progress of Visa Free travel for Ukrainians, as covered by Nikolai in mid-January.
The more obvious something is, the more likely it is to be overlooked…
perhaps starting with a “Yeah, yeah, I know that…” and leading to “OMG! This is
a lot more complex than I thought!” We only need look at issues of immigration
and refugee integration across the EU and USA to see things are not going quite
as planned… or prompting the conspiracy-minded to question perhaps “fubar” is
the desired outcome. And someone with a Six Sigma background will simply see
things going “fubar” as part of a long-term process.
My initial intention was to address several of the factors applying to
“integration” as relates to Ukrainian companies – language, social-professional
networking, financial components and “issues of trust.” So much of this should
be obvious and most of the balance overlaps with the legal/regulatory/financial
components addressed previously. Within the context of the DCFTA, it prompts
what may be a pre-mature conclusion that in almost every regard, companies in
the EU have a very considerable advantage over their Ukrainian counterparts.
Even factoring that the full force of the DCFTA rolls out over ten years,
all else being equal – EU companies will always be a decade ahead. Or will
they?
For as large as the European Union and Ukraine may be, they do not exist
within a vacuum and are equally subject to broader international processes and
trends. While there are and will be fluctuations, these “processes and trends”
are all moving in one direction – toward a single, integrated global economy –
faster then we might expect.
Free trade agreements are an essential process – and we can get a very good
approximation of how they will work based on the North Atlantic Free Trade
Agreement. http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9563.html In terms of purchasing
power parity; average wages in the United States have decreased, but have
increased in Canada and Mexico. Economically-speaking, Ukraine is to the
European Union as Mexico is to the United States.
Free trade (usually) facilitates immigration and vice versa. Would it be
fair to say that there are more Ukrainian companies and more young Ukrainians
want to move to, live and work in the EU than there are the same in the EU with
eyes on Ukraine? That’s a fair topic for later discussion.
Free trade and immigration are only two components and the most often
discussed because there is a significant divide between the
social-political-economics community and the tech-science community. The
conventional Internet, the rise of Mobile Technology, the potential of the
Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, Robotics and being on the cusp of AI, are
other components. We are likely to see real-time voice translators in the next
few years not to mention ongoing massive leaps in brain-computer interfaces.
Most people still only have a fairly basic understanding of the Internet
while those with the appropriate technical skills can make use of it to have
near-NSA level surveillance.
Remember, Ukraine has the fourth largest population of certified IT professionals, behind only the United States, India and Russia – or as Obama would say, “Ukraine punches above its weight,” in the IT world. Unlike the unfortunate IT professionals in Russia; most of the rest of the world (the EU, North America and China) is favorably inclined to Ukrainian IT professionals (and startups).
Some may interpret this as a massive digression from the matter of
integration. It is admittedly cloudy – but it prompts one good question, “What
do you see in 10 years?”
There will be a vast disparity between what one sees whether they include
tech in their progression or not. The faster improvements are made on the
technical front… the faster subsequent improvements become.
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