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Economic modernization is crucial to foreign investment, expert says

Belarus may become attractive for foreign investments only if its economy is modernized, Heorhiy Hryts, a department chair at Belarusian State University’s Institute for Business and Technologies Management, said at a round-table conference in Minsk on Wednesday, BelaPAN said.

Belarus still has a Soviet-style economy and the government “must not continue advertising this country, it must take efforts to create a new country with a new image,” the expert said, adding that the country’s industrial giants like the Minsk Tractor Works and the Minsk Automobile Factory relied on obsolete technologies and business practices.

Dr. Hryts warned that Belarus would become no longer attractive even as a member of the Customs Union after the bloc's two other member states - Kazakhstan and Russia - joined the World Trade Organization. “We cannot join the WTO as our economy, which is functioning under the present conditions, will not survive [in this case],” he stressed, adding that the Belarusian economy was developing “not according to the rules of the WTO.”