What should we make to bring the competition to the market with no competition at all due to the existence of a natural monopoly? According to the Head of the Better Regulation Delivery Office (BRDO) Oleksiy Honcharuk, it is required at least a plan of meaningful actions if not a state program aimed at the emergence of this competition. He said that at his speech at the round table devoted to the prospects of competition development in energy.
Oleksiy Honcharuk believes that this is the most difficult task, when it comes to the competition regulation in general. This is a huge and very complicated task for the Anti-Monopoly Committee. He expressed the hope that the Committee had a clear and effective action plan in this regard.
“In our opinion, such a clear plan and roadmaps will significantly accelerate the entry of competition in these markets,” he said and added that the regulation wouldn’t be effective if the business didn’t understand for what it was made and what they were required to do. So, the communication shouldn’t be a main task in this area.
The BRDO Head also stressed that an important element of this process was a regulator. However, it is no more and no less than the element of the entire infrastructure, the whole system of state regulation.
According to Oleksiy Honcharuk, the fact that our regulator is independent doesn’t mean that he is hanging in a vacuum and doing what he wants. He is definitely depending on legal requirements, and the requirements of regulatory legislation are very clearly defined, in particular – by the Law on Main Principles of State Regulatory Policy. It describes the way, in which government authorities have to deal with the business to make it feel the adequacy of the state.
Above all, this is the clarity of rules of conduct, predictability and reasonability. Predictability and reasonability of regulator’s decisions in the energy sector are a guarantee of the entry of competition, inflow of investments, sector’s development and the introduction of new standards of effective regulation.