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“The Belarusian authorities speed up their ambitious privatization
programme while in the mean time the authoritarian state structure remains
untouched”, wrote the German analytical internet source Telepolis.
“In the course of the past months the Belarusian
authorities shifted radically towards economic reforms… In the meantime
Belarus remains
the only post-Soviet country with the dominating state-ownership on property
form of the economy and where there are no Russia-like oligarchs, who emerged
from the ‘wild’ privatization, at all. The part of the private sector in the
National Gross Product of this Easter-European country comprises around 25 %
and the property ownership of the most wealthy Belarusians is measured in
Millions rather than Billions of US Dollars”.
The German Medium writes, that “Belarusian government is
assuring that the process of privatization will be conducted gradually and
orderly which is deemed to prevent from the wild and unpredictable
privatization”. In their turn, “directors of Belarusian enterprises fear that
Russian capitalists will buy up everything inside the country”.
At the same time, the Kremlin regards Belarus with its
current significant financial dependence on Moscow as a province of Russia and
hopes for ‘Union’ at the end however German analysts think that Lukashenko, in
reverse, is eager to prevent this scenario from happening. Therefore Telepolis
writes, that “Western capital also has pretty good chances for developing this
last post-Soviet ‘terra incognita’ in the
Eastern Europe”.
It is important for the Belarusian authorities to attract Western investors to
counterbalance the Russian influence.
The German Telepolis considers that “capitalism can
co-exist with the authoritarian regime to the full extent”. Similar situation
could be observed in
China
and a number of other countries. Indeed, the most defected from the delayed transformation
of the system will be, again, the population, which may already prepare itself for
the process of mass pauperization in
Belarus.
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