2018 in review
Analysis published during 2018.
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St Nicholas Day, 19 December 2018
A greeting for the morning when children find something small under the pillow, and a word for the people who arrange it for children who have nobody.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The Turkey–Ukraine free trade agreement: why a decade, and what it changes
Negotiations opened in 2007 and the agreement took until 2022 to sign. The delay is instructive: it was not about tariffs on the bulk of trade, but about…
Trade & Investment -
Holodomor Remembrance Day, 24 November 2018
A day for the names that were recorded and the ones that were not.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukrainian Language Day, 9 November 2018
A language day greeting, and the dictation that half the country writes at the same time.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q3 2018
Steady growth, an IT sector that had quietly become one of the country's largest export earners, and a gas transit contract expiring at the end of the following…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Reading Ukrainian statistics properly
The data is better than its reputation and thinner in specific places. Knowing which places is the difference between a useful figure and a misleading one.
Economy & Macro -
After-sales is the actual product
A customer buying industrial equipment is not buying a machine. They are buying fifteen years of that machine working, and everything that determines whether it does.
Trade & Investment -
Knowledge Day 2018
The year the New Ukrainian School reform reached the first grade, and a generation started under a different curriculum from the one their older siblings had.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The kobzars and the sung epic
A tradition of long narrative songs, performed by blind itinerant musicians who were organised into guilds with their own rules, training and secret language.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Independence Day 2018: pressure on the sea, and an election in view
Twenty-seven years. Growth is holding above three per cent, an anti-corruption court has finally been legislated — and shipping through the Sea of Azov is being squeezed in…
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ease of doing business: what the rankings measure, and what they miss
Ukraine climbed a long way up the international rankings between 2012 and 2019, and the climb was real. It also did not correspond to how the market actually…
Economy & Macro -
Inbound tourism after visa liberalisation: what changed and what did not
Visa-free travel to the EU changed the direction of Ukrainian tourist flows immediately. Its effect on inbound tourism was smaller, slower and more interesting, because it exposed which…
Society & Regions -
Why the hryvnia stopped moving: the mechanics of a managed float
After two collapses in seven years the currency became boring, and that was an achievement rather than an accident. What changed was the regime, and understanding it tells…
Economy & Macro -
Ukraine Market Report — Q2 2018
A bridge opened across the Kerch Strait in May, and the physical constraint it imposed on vessels reaching the Azov ports became a commercial fact for the exporters…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Ivana Kupala 2018
Midsummer, and the observation that this is the one festival where the young organise and the old attend.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Constitution Day, 28 June 2018
A greeting for Constitution Day, and a word about the boring parts.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The Business Ombudsman Council
An institution set up to take complaints from businesses against the state, with no power to compel anything, which nonetheless recovered a great deal of money.
Politics & Governance -
How the Rada actually passes a law
Anyone whose business depends on Ukrainian legislation should understand the procedure, because knowing where a bill is tells you what can still be changed.
Politics & Governance -
Ukraine in the Baltic and Nordic business conversation: a different set of assumptions
Companies from the Baltic states and the Nordic countries approach this market with a set of assumptions quite unlike those brought by western European entrants, and their record…
Trade & Investment -
District heating: the system nobody sees
Most Ukrainian city households are heated by a network of pipes running under the street from a central plant. It is the largest piece of infrastructure most people…
Energy & Infrastructure -
Vyshyvanka Day, 17 May 2018
A greeting for the day, and a note on the shirts worn by people with no Ukrainian family at all.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The shadow economy, and the slow work of shrinking it
A large informal economy is usually described as a moral failing. It is more useful to read it as a price list: what people pay to stay outside…
Economy & Macro -
Selling to the state through Prozorro
The public procurement system is open to any registered supplier, including a foreign one. Most losing bids lose on a technicality rather than on price.
Trade & Investment -
Ukraine Market Report — Q1 2018
Growth continuing, EU exports expanding as more producers cleared certification, and a labour market tightening quarter by quarter across every sector that employs people at scale.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Easter 2018
A note on the paska itself: why it is baked tall, and why the recipe belongs to a specific grandmother rather than to a country.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Open data as public infrastructure
Ukraine publishes an unusual amount of state data openly. The value of that is not transparency in the abstract; it is what specific people do with specific datasets.
Politics & Governance -
Ivana Kupala: fire, water and the shortest night
A midsummer festival of fire and water, paired at every point, and part of a complex that runs across the whole of Europe.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Corn and the shift in the crop mix
Ukrainian farmers moved substantially into maize over two decades. The reasons are a good illustration of how a crop mix actually gets decided.
Agriculture & Food -
Prozorro and the open budget
Every public tender and every budget transaction is published. For a supplier that is not a governance story; it is a research tool.
Economy & Macro -
Why the reform direction became irreversible, and what irreversible actually means
Ukrainian policy direction reversed in 2004 and again in 2010. It has not reversed since 2014, and the reason is not that the politics settled — it is…
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
A professional civil service
A state is only as capable as the people in its ministries. Building a civil service that survives a change of government is the least visible reform there…
Politics & Governance -
Entering the Ukrainian market: the checklist
The questions a company should answer before committing to Ukraine, in the order that actually matters rather than the order they usually get asked.
Trade & Investment -
The pysanka: geometry, wax and meaning
A pysanka is not a painted egg. It is a wax-resist batik executed on a curved surface with no margin for error, carrying an ornamental vocabulary older than…
Folklore & Esoterica -
Yields, and the gap that closed
Ukrainian grain yields roughly doubled over two decades on the same soil. Understanding how is more useful than admiring that it happened.
Agriculture & Food -
Sanitary and phytosanitary alignment
Food safety alignment is the chapter that produces the most immediate commercial results, because each completed step opens a specific export permission.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Approximation: adopting a body of law
A candidate country has to bring tens of thousands of pages of law into its own legal order. The obstacle is not willingness; it is drafting capacity.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Inflation targeting, explained from a purchasing desk
What a formal inflation target actually does for a business is remove one variable from a plan, and that is worth more than it sounds.
Economy & Macro -
Diagonal cumulation and why it changes sourcing
One of the least discussed trade mechanisms decides where a manufacturer buys its inputs. Understanding it is worth more than reading a tariff schedule.
Trade & Investment -
Ukraine Annual Review 2017: growth returns and the constraint changes
A second year of recovery, visa-free travel, the association agreement fully in force, and the emergence of a labour shortage that would bind harder than any capital constraint…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Ukrainians working abroad
Labour migration from Ukraine has been one of the largest movements of working people in Europe for two decades. It is usually discussed as a loss. The accounting…
Society & Regions -
Koliada and the winter singing
The carols sung in Ukraine at Christmas divide into two kinds, and the older kind has nothing to do with Christmas at all.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Day of Unity 2018
A January day, and a foreigner's note on the difference between a country being united and a country agreeing.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q4 2017
A second full year of growth, EU exports rising as certifications accumulated, and labour shortage emerging as the constraint that would define the following five years.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Christmas 2018
The seventh of January, and a note on kutia — the first dish, and the one nobody skips.
National Days & Anniversaries -
New Year, 1 January 2018
A new year greeting, and a note on the one dish that appears on every table regardless of anything else.
National Days & Anniversaries
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