Moldova not successful on the path to European integration

If Moldova was now put in the situation to initiate talks over admission to the European Union, the Government would not be able to cope with such a task. This conclusion was formulated by analysts of Expert Grup after thoroughly analyzing the economic component of the EU-Moldova Action Plan, Info-Prim Neo reports. Even if most of the national official reports on the implementation of the Plan during 2005-2007 indicate progress, experts say that many of the reported measures are irrelevant. Valeriu Prohnitchi, the executive director of Expert Grup, says that after the plan has been implemented for three years, Moldova approached EU insignificantly from economic viewpoint. He considers that the achieved convergence is so fragile that a decline is also possible. According to the analysis, the implementation of the Plan’s economic component could be described as minor-moderate progress. The experts underline that the economic activities proposed by the EU in different areas have been implemented unevenly. “The progress could have been much more observable if we had not delayed the implementation of reforms, the adoption of certain laws and Government decisions,” Valeriu Prohnitchi said. The experts consider that the principal measures from the Plan that have been imperfectly implemented by the Government are related to several sectors of the economy. The functionality of the main institutions that regulate the market is improperly ensured. The national legislation has not been yet reviewed for the purpose of identifying the barriers to providing cross-border services. Moldova did not make progress in working out a strategy for developing the official statistics system. During three years, the cooperation between Moldova and the EU in carrying out field verifications and inspections to check how the EU funds are managed and monitored has been practically absent. The most serious fact yet is the stagnation of the process of homogenizing and adjusting the national standards on public expenditure control to the international standards and the best EU practices in the field. Given such circumstances, the aim of the analysis carried out by Expert Grup was to independently assess the implementation of the economic component of the EU-Moldova Action Plan. The researchers aimed to determine the practical impact of the measures taken so as to highlight the major problems and short and medium-term priorities. They say that the study is important because it reveals the way in which the cooperation potential between the parties has been realized until present. The analysis was made with the aim of proposing steps that Moldova should take to sign a more elaborate Free Trade Agreement with the European Union and elements that should be included in this Agreement. The study also comes to challenge the Government’s assessments. According to analysts of Expert Grup, the acknowledgment of the drawbacks and shortcomings admitted while implementing the Plan is more important than the sensation of false self-satisfactions that the Government could have as a result of foreign diplomatic evaluations or of subjective self-assessment. Expert-Grup is an independent, nonprofit think tank specialized in research, consulting and guidance on social and economic matters.