Synopsis top ↑
By various estimates, including those of US Geological Survey, the
mineral wealth of Ukraine is high enough. Production from mineral raw
materials accounted for 40% of Ukraine’s GDP in 2000, and about 60% of
the country’s budget revenues. Despite the significance of mineral raw
materials to the country’s economy, Government support for the
geological sector has greatly decreased since the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. At the time of the breakup, 41 geological organizations
that employed 58,760 persons were state supported; by 2003, the
number of state-supported organizations had decreased to 11 and the
number of workers to 9,839. The level of Government funding for geologic work had been reduced by more than 70%. Owing to the lack of
financial support, the country was experiencing a shortage of needed
specialists and was lacking up-to-date technology and equipment.
Whether the country mineral resources are foreseen to be developed
extensively essentially depends on the non-government investments
involved. The own experience of Ukraine and examples from other CIS
countries strongly suggest for the best country interests in the
foreign direct investments provided by the senior and junior mining
and exploration companies of various origin including mainly those
listed on the major world stock exchanges. However, it becomes more
and more evident that mineral resources FDI advantages and efficiency
do strongly depend not only on the general investment environment in
Ukraine but also considerably rely on the knowledge base available for
the foreign investors. Besides the common regulation restrictions and
data scarcity, in case of Ukraine and other CIS countries the data
access is thought to be essentially complicated to the foreign
companies simply due to the language barrier. Specifically, most of
geological information in Ukraine is being recorded in Ukrainian with
minor amount of Russian items from the past years. Thus, the
persistent FDI provision requires facilitating the normal documents
filed in various geological entities of Ukraine to be presented in
English at least.
While a number of geological data being permanently staked in the
country research, prospecting, exploration and mining units concerns
the mineral details and their Ukrainian-English translation could be
the matter of particular negotiations between the data holders and the
interested applicants, some principal items seem to be of primary
importance and definitely should be issued in English and accessible
to the broad community of the foreign investors providing the backbone
assets for their subsequent mineral activities. Apparently, these
items are likely to be comprehensive enough to make possible robust
foreign investor’s decision whether foreseen mineral applications in
Ukraine would provide advantages compared to investing elsewhere. The mineral FDI provision therefore requires multi-purpose English-fashion geological information which integrates general mineral patterns and highlights specific mineral targets at the same time. In our mind, these
conditions can be maintained on the ground of the State Geological Map
of Ukraine in the scale 1:200 000.