Opening remarks by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin:

Ladies and gentlemen,

Tomorrow we will meet with our Belarusian and Kazakh partners to discuss several very important issues regarding the Common Economic Space. We will need to coordinate a total of almost 20 intergovernmental agreements.

I'd like to stress right away that the creation of the Common Economic Space of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan is undoubtedly our priority. We have great hopes for this project, and we expect that it will create new opportunities for the Russian economy and the economies of our partners, increase their competitiveness and spur the flow of capital, technology and goods between our states.

We have agreed to speed up efforts to achieve a new level of integration now that the Customs Union has been established and to expedite the launch of the Common Economic Space. To this end, we have decided to do out best to draw up all the necessary legislation by January 1, 2011, rather than in two phases as we planned initially. The Common Economic Space must be launched in 2012.

The concept behind the Common Economic Space is for everyone involved in business here to play by the same rules and for the founding states to extensively coordinate their economic policies and their positions on macroeconomic issues, currency markets, antimonopoly regulation and technological standards.

It is critically important that the documents we are drawing up should not be just framework agreements but should contain actual and effective mechanisms to be launched through these trilateral agreements. Our primary goal is to create a common economic environment where decisions will be made at the supranational level.

Our future work should be guided by two main principles. First, the purpose of the Common Economic Space is to foster the development of our economies. New incentives are expected to encourage businesses and entire industries to adopt new technology more extensively, reduce costs and increase labour productivity. Second, administrative procedures and the work of government bodies must be as efficient as possible to create a favourable investment climate here.

As you know, the basic legislation for the Common Economic Space includes 17 general agreements. We have coordinated three of them, five are almost done, and the rest are in the consultation phase. Several issues required additional coordination, but on the whole we are working fairly fast on these agreements and hopefully we will keep this pace until work is complete.