Wayne R Thirsk

Ukraine in the 1990s needed to reform its intergovernmental finance system both to increase the overall efficiency of the public sector and to strengthen its nascent democracy. A more transparent system of intergovernmental fiscal relations also held the promise of better addressing the different views about the country's future in eastern and western parts of the country. Reluctantly, at the beginning of the transition but at full force in the late 1990s, Ukraine joined many other countries around the world in an effort to redefine its system of intergovernmental fiscal relations. This book discusses the fiscal decentralisation reform in Ukraine by covering both the deep problems and failures that were encountered for almost a decade and the quite spectacular success of the reforms introduced in 2001.