The goal of the research suggested below by the Enlargement Hub is to provide Ukrainian decision-makers with actionable policy proposals about the assesment and management of the impact of the adaptation of the Ukrainian legislation to the EU law.

There are two types of impacts of the implementation of EU rules. The first type of impacts are linked to the legal, institutional, infrastructural, fiscal and behavioural changes required to play by the EU rules. The second types of impacts are linked to investments in human and fiscal capital, institutional changes, capacity building programs that could allow economic players (firms, value chains, cities, regions, workers etc.) to live by and benefit from the EU rules. The first types of impacts are short-term and are easily measurable. The second types of impacts are long-term, they are shaped primarily by public policies, they depend on such factors like the nature of these policies, their inclusiveness, the breadth of the coalition of economic and political actors involved, or the types of resources mobilized. As a consequence, impact assessment in their case has to be based on alternative scenarios and have to include staged and structured deliberations among different categories of stakeholders.

The first group of impacts is linked to the Copenhagen criteria on the “capacity to effectively implement the rules, standards and policies” of EU, the second is linked to the Copenhagen criteria on the “ability to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the EU”. The first of these criteria is non-negotiable and impact assessment has to consider all costs linked to get EU rules “on the books” and to implement them on the ground.

The EU approach to the second economic criteria is “minimalist”. It consists of the most elementary conditions of entering the Single Market and staying afloat there without requiring considerable use of state aid or EU transfers. Meeting these “minimalist” requirement might impose considerable costs on accession countries. But the most important lesson from the previous wave of Eastern enlargement was that those new member states, those sectors and those regions gained most from EU membership, and could withstand better the economic and political challenges of membership that went beyond the ‘minimalist’ requirements and have implemented early on policies that could improve the position and increase the gains of their firms, diverse categories of economic actors and sub-national units in the Single Market.

It was the key lessons of the previous wave of EU enlargement that without adaptive policies, rule transfer can lead to economic marginalization for a large number of domestic economic actors and increase of territorial disparities, empowering populist and Eurosceptic movements.
The Hub mobilizes researchers of the previous wave of Eastern Enlargement and the governance of the Single Market with the goal of helping the design of policies that could increase the range of winners from the taking of EU rules.

The research project focuses on the longer-term impact of implementing the required EU rules while it also aims at helping the assesment and management of the short-term impact of implementing the EU mandated rules. The two tracks of the projects while they will interact, will be timewise separated.

First track: In close collaboration with the State Research Institute for Informatization and Economic Modeling (SRIIEM) it will produce updated guidelines for the estimation of the short-term administrative and financial costs of rule taking. We will use the milk and forestry subsectors as pilots to help SRIIEM to finalize the design of the research strategy. This will be the faster track, we plan to start late November, early December 2025 and get the updated guidelines by the mid January 2026.

Second track:

• In close collaboration with Ministry of Economy, EasyBusiness, SRIIEM, business associations and NGOs, the researchers of the HUB will prepare policy analysis and stakeholder mapping with a focus on the variable longer-term risks and opportunities, costs and gains of regulatory integration
• With the help of the office of the Deputy PM and the Ministry of Economy, the Enlargement Hub research team provides materials for organizing discussions of alternative scenarios exploring links between different policy mixes and long-term outcomes
• Contributes to the setting up of National Development Coordination Team (NDCT) and the Sectoral Change Teams that will oversee the creation of a National Implementation Plan and diverse sectoral plans and that will manage the policies shaping the long-term impacts of EU rule adoption. It provides background analyses for NDCT policy making.

Timeline:
We would like to start in November 2025 with matching our researchers with Ukrainian partners from research, policy advice and policy making. We plan to have a conference in Lviv in January to consolidate the workplan and coordinate collaboration between our researchers and the partners from Ukraine. We plan to start research in February 2026, have a first conference on the preliminary results in April, 2026, discuss in a separate meeting the first draft papers sometimes in June, 2026 and the final versions in late September 2026. In collaboration with our Ukrainian colleagues we will create a separate timeline to discuss the steps of collaboration for all the specific research programs listed below.