Understanding the EU’s Association Agreements, and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTAs) with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia

Donor: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida

Period of implementation: April 2015 – March 2018

Project scope: To provide research concerning the legal, political and economic implications of the three Association Agreements and DCFTAs negotiated between EU and Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia.

What will the project do?

• Produce a comprehensive and compact Handbook for each of the three country cases. The Handbooks concerning Moldova was published in autumn 2016 and it is available in Romanian, English and Russian. The Handbooks on Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia explain in readily understandable and concrete terms what the legal commitments undertaken amount to, and describe also the challenges of implementation for the public and private sectors.
• Elaborate selected ‘hot topics’ on issues related to difficulties encountered by the Agreements between EU and Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine. The outputs may range from short commentaries on topical questions to in-depth studies on challenges for the implementation of the Association Agreements with EU.

Key stakeholders: On Moldova, the central public administration institutions, in particular, the Ministry of Economy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs and European Integration, which deal with the implementation of the Association Agreement with the EU, will benefit from the research and the publications delivered within the project.

Related activities:

• Analyzing the implementation of the Association Agreement in different areas and providing recommendations to relevant authorities;
• Improving the public understanding about the Association Agreement with EU.

The project is led by:

• Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels/team leaders: Michael Emerson and Steven Blockmans, in partnership with: 
• Expert-Grup in Chisinau/team leader: Denis Cenusa
• Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER) in Kyiv/team leaders: Igor Burakovsky and Veronika Movchan
• Reformatics in Tbilisi/team leader: Tamara Kovziridze