NUCLEAR POWER IN BELARUS AND WORLDWIDE
MINSK, 3 February (BelTA) – The EAEU needs effective instruments to encourage industrial cooperation, Belarus' Prime Minister Roman Golovchenko said at a meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council in Almaty, BelTA has learned.
“Belarus believes that the EAEU will be able to advance in the creation of new high-tech industries through the mechanism of financial support for cooperation projects. This mechanism should be launched as soon as possible after the relevant decision is made by the heads of state. Let me remind you that for the first time in the history of our union, it was decided to allocate funds from the EAEU budget to support industrial cooperation. The money will be used to refund interest rates on loans. However, refunding interest rates is not enough. We need other tools to invigorate industrial cooperation,” said Roman Golovchenko.
According to him, in order to address this problem, it is necessary to involve national and Eurasian development institutions, to get them involved in the work on long-term strategic goals of the EAEU socio-economic development. “We discussed this in detail during a narrow-format meeting yesterday,” the Belarusian head of government said.
The prime minister also stressed that the industry should also be ready for the launch of the financial support mechanism. “The work to develop and select promising and relevant projects involving at least three member states should start now. I want to emphasize the important role of the commission that should act as a system coordinator of the work,” he added.
In addition, Roman Golovchenko also touched upon the implementation of the industrialization map in the EAEU. “It includes big investment projects in the EAEU. There are 158 of them, and they are estimated at about $270 billion. We have studied the technological fields in the map where the EAEU needs import substitution. These are 670 fields in 30 industries where it is necessary to create production chains within the framework of the entire union. There is no need to invent anything new, we just need to use existing documents creatively. For example, the average annual import of hardware products to the EAEU countries is about $1 billion,” he said.
