Institutions of collective investment in Ukraine: scale and consequences of investment dysfunction

Abstract

The development of collective investment institutions (CIIs) in Ukraine is characterized by rather ambiguous and stable trends, which at first glance do not have any objective economic basis. The dynamics of CIIs activities in Ukraine demonstrates their steady invulnerability to the crises in the global and national economy, maintaining positions (in quantity terms) against the background of reduced number of both professional stock market participants and other institutional investors, and despite the decrease in the financial instruments in circulation, and the gradual formation in public consciousness of a neutral negative view of the functioning of the national stock market. The authors' assumption that the key to such institutional viability consists in the tax preferences for the CIIs, which is confirmed by the analysis. It is noted that in this case both the economic sense and the declared "collectivity" of this investment institution are distorted. The use of CIIs solely to ease the tax burden, with gross legal and tax violations creates risks for both the beneficiaries of such tax schemes and for the very existence of the institution. The specificity of "investment areas" outside the stock market, the highly conditional performance of the function of accumulation of investment resources and, correspondingly, the profanation of the CIIs' issuer function, in particular as to the fair distribution of investment income, distortions of the essence of the ideology of collective investment in combination with extremely loyal regulation on the part of the NSSMC all presently call into question the entire possibility of considering CIIs as a full-fledged component of the stock market.