The impact of transaction costs on the transformation of the natural gas market of Ukraine

Abstract

The desire to integrate into the European development model stipulated that Ukraine voluntarily assumed international commitments about transformation of the institutional environment according to the European model. The level of political awareness of the content of the necessary changes and how to achieve a systemic balance of reforming different sectors was often declarative in the absence of any sound estimates, including the implications for different economic actors. However, the need to reform the energy sector was determined not only by international obligations, but also by the presence of domestic problems, which over time without the application of systemic changes would become barriers to the entire further economic development of Ukraine. The main content of the implementation of European directives in the energy sector was just intended to systematically transform market relations by changing the rules of market functioning, which was supposed to solve the main crisis problems in various areas of the energy sector. The recent model of Ukrainian natural gas market was featured by all the shortcomings of the pre-reformed state of European markets: the tariff system did not promote rational consumer behavior, which exacerbated the pressure on the state budget; the delivery rules did not guarantee the proper quality of service; the absence of investment in the gas transportation sector made it impossible to expand fixed assets; the established transport and distribution rules became a barrier to free access to third-party networks and the development of competition in the supply segment. The actual implementation of the Second and Third Energy Package standards in the functioning of the national market of the natural year began in 2015, with the adoption of the Law on the Natural Gas Market. Today, an urgent task remains to estimate the process of reforming the natural gas market and to efficiently solve those crisis phenomena that caused the distortion of the institutional environment of the natural gas market. Since the accumulated problems of the previous model of the natural gas market were due to the inefficiency of the institutions, the article attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of the gas sector transformation process and analyze the impact of changes in certain market segments from the perspective of neoinstitutional theory and study the level of transaction costs.