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Modernization in Belarus should be carried out at fast pace, Lukashenka says

Modernization in Belarus should be carried out at a fast pace, Alyaksandr Lukashenka said Friday in his annual address to the nation and the National Assembly.

The Belarusian leader directed that reaching an annual revenue no less than $60,000 per employee should become an efficiency criterion for modernization in the country.

Russia, one of Belarus' partners within the Customs Union, has already joined the World Trade Organization, and Kazakhstan, another Belarus' partner within the Union, is about to join the WTO, which means that “we already work under the tough conditions of global competition," Mr. Lukashenka said. "So we have no alternative to modernizing the economy at a fast pace."

The government’s modernization effort has drawn “much unnecessary ridicule” from the press, Mr. Lukashenka noted. "Opponents say that the authorities have invented a new election slogan, and that everything will boil down to empty talks," he said. "They’ve come to the strange conclusion that the potential for increasing the competitive capacity of Belarusian products has been exhausted and leads to the degradation of our economy in absolute terms, and therefore we don't need to modernize it [the economy] but should simply throw it away and adopt a fundamentally new model."

"We once learned what this means and chose a different path," Mr. Lukashenka said. According to him, foreign diplomats and politicians abroad “murmur” words of admiration and praise for the Belarusians behind the scenes. “"And we can see that we turned out to be right to choose this path," he said. "Our opponents and undisguised enemies – the fifth column – have no new ideas to offer, and that's why they have taken out their old weapons, starting to suggest closing down and liquidating everything."

"Our path is to create and not destroy," Mr. Lukashenka noted. "Modernization in the country started a long time ago and I would say that we are approaching the final stage of this modernization." //BelaPAN