The approved program of the country’s socio-economic development until 2025 states that the main criterion for integration should be to ensure equal conditions for business, energy consumption, access to markets, participation in public procurement, and the use of financial instruments.
According to TASS, according to the program of socio-economic development of the country for 2021-2025 approved by President Alexander Lukashenko, published on Wednesday on the national legal portal, the development of mutually beneficial cooperation with Russia will be a priority area of economic integration for Belarus in the next five years.
“The state policy will be aimed at developing mutually beneficial economic integration within the Union State, the EAEU and the CIS, strengthening strategic partnership with China, expanding foreign economic relations with other states. The main vector is the deepening of bilateral integration with the Russian Federation within the framework of the Union State in compliance with national interests”, the document says.
Minsk believes that the main criterion for integration should be “ensuring equal conditions of management, energy consumption, access to markets, participation in government procurement, and the use of financial instruments.”
“Effective tools will be joint action programs in specific areas of activity, the deepening of industrial cooperation, the development of regional cooperation”, the program says.
It also notes that it is in the interests of Belarus to create a full-fledged economic union within the EAEU, ensuring freedom of movement of goods, services, capital and labor without barriers, exemptions and restrictions. Within the framework of the EAEU, the developers of the program specified, it is necessary to create “a single market for services and a common financial market, including a common payment space and the use of national currencies in mutual settlements.”
In addition, the participants of Eurasian integration need to “implement in practice a coordinated macroeconomic, industrial, agricultural, transport policy and a coordinated energy policy, organize joint production, including import substitution, develop new cooperative ties with the provision of additional measures to support the promotion of manufactured goods and services to the markets. third countries”.