Ukraine trailing the 2007 International Property Rights Index

The 2007 International Property Rights Index (IPRI), published on 5 March, places Ukraine in 56th place out of 70 of the largest countries in the world. The rating is based on an overall assessment of the level of protection of property rights. The index was prepared by the Property Rights Alliance with the support of the prominent economist and President of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy (Peru) Hernando de Soto. Methodology The IPPRI is based on eleven factors which can be divided into three areas: 1. Legal and Political Environment – the independence of the courts, public trust in the judiciary, political stability and corruption; 2. Physical Property Rights – protection of property rights through the law, registration of property and access to loans; 3. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) – protection of these, patent law, “piracy” of authors’ rights and protection of trademarks. A specific feature of this Index is that it incorporates data from different studies, surveys and indexes. These include the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Index, studies undertaken by the World Bank (on the investment climate, state management findings and how easy it is to do business), the Transparency International corruption perceptions index , reports from the World Trademark Association, and others. The ironic fact is that Ukraine can boast of only one figure: gender equality in ensuring property rights. Ukraine got a rating of 9.3 out of 12 possible in this area, the same as the UK, USA and Japan. This means however that in Ukraine, men and women are equally unprotected as regards property rights. The experts did however express restrained optimism. “Ukraine’s position is not so bad considering that the 70 countries covered by the index are not the worst. If one added others, then the situation wouldn’t change so much, but Ukraine would be in the middle of the list”, senior economist from CASE Ukraine Volodymyr Dubrovsky says. He points out that according to the important factor of protection of physical property rights Ukraine looks bad (this is the only aspect where it is worse than Russia). Yet for some reason Poland has an even lower reading. Director of the Department for Economic Development and Publications of the International Centre for Policy Studies Oleksy Blinov believes that the rating may have certain inaccuracies which would be in Ukraine’s favour. “The authors do not use authentic data from the countries, but the ratings of other organizations. We can’t therefore be sure that Ukraine really has a worse record on protecting property rights than, say, Honduras.” The Property Rights Alliance stress that the greater the number of points on the IPRI, the higher the standard of living. “The final results show an 89 percent correlation between GDP per capita and the IPRI score for each country: the stronger the rights of ownership, the better off the population”