Oleksandr Kobzarev
Director, City Institute (Lviv, Ukraine)
Mr. Kobzarev, why is local economic development so important?
– When it comes to the economic development of a country, we should not forget that every region has its own distinctive character. It is very difficult to establish an effective economic development policy within a country based on local peculiarities to meet all regional needs. Let’s take Ukraine as an example. Big industrial enterprises are found in the eastern part of the country. Small and medium-sized enterprises are usually located in Ukraine’s western regions. Southern Ukraine features agricultural enterprises. If we want to establish an efficient and powerful economy in every municipality, region, and in the whole country, we should rely on local peculiarities. Local economic development can lead to prosperity through strong communities.
Please tell us about initiatives, which were implemented by the City Institute in cooperation with the MLED Project.
– We implemented several joint projects. There was a separate gender equality project. We invited women to participate in certain training workshops. At that time we were cooperating with an organization called “Women’s Perspectives”. It’s still operating today. I believe our cooperation was very important. There were also other areas of cooperation. For example, we worked on the investment attraction strategy, which has reached now its qualitative stage. However, the team dealing with investment issues was replaced. Now a new team makes decisions as to whether to preserve the existing direction of development, or to choose another one.
We were cooperating with the MLED Project in the development of an innovative environment and building innovative businesses. This sphere is absolutely successful and constant. In particular, the first phase of micro-projects, financed by MLED, has been already completed. Also, the Lviv Innovation Centre was established. It became the first Ukrainian municipal incubator, which caters for IT start-ups. The incubator was created in cooperation with the MLED Project. Today, the incubator has successfully grown into a spin-off. It is an independent organization, which does not receive any financial support from the city budget and is self-financing. It operates rather efficiently. Now we are expanding the Incubator to almost twice its current size under another partner project of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
Cooperation with the MLED Project was very important not only due to financial support. Study tours arranged under the Project were very useful, too. To be more specific, in Edmonton, Canada, we were introduced to a business incubator model we were able to implement here in Lviv. We analyzed a lot of different models used in Canada, Poland, and Ukraine. Edmonton’s model proved to be the most attractive and achievable for us.
There were other areas of cooperation related to transparency and ease of doing business. For example, the web-site of the Office of Community Property is very popular in Lviv. Once we asked ourselves why so many entrepreneurs did not want to deal with community property. And we found an answer. The reason is that the sphere of community property is believed to be highly corrupt and not transparent. We decided to solve this problem in a creative way. What about looking at the Office of Community Property as the biggest city developer, which, in fact, is responsible for the city’s property management. So we had to use certain promotion methods. There was complete understanding between the Director of the Office and our team. One of the steps taken to ensure transparency was creation of the web-site where you can find available spaces for rent or sale. There you can see photos and technical documentation of such spaces. It means you can get complete information about a specific object of property. It is transparent and open. Such examples facilitate the effective implementation of the local economic development policy.