2021 in review
Analysis published during 2021.
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St Nicholas Day, 19 December 2021
A greeting for a St Nicholas morning in the last ordinary December before everything else.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Holodomor Remembrance Day 2021
A candle in the window on the fourth Saturday of November.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukrainian Language Day, 9 November 2021
A language day greeting, and a note on the people who translate in the other direction.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Opening procurement both ways
A Ukrainian company can bid for public contracts in the European Union, and European companies can bid here. The reciprocity is the point and it is underused.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Reforming the customs service
Customs has been reformed more often than almost any other Ukrainian institution, which tells you both how important it is and how hard it has been.
Politics & Governance -
Hedging a hryvnia exposure
A company earning in hryvnia and owing in euros has a problem that arithmetic alone will not solve. The available tools are limited and worth knowing precisely.
Economy & Macro -
Digital skills and who is left out
When a state moves its services onto a phone, the people without the phone or the skill do not become invisible. They become harder to serve.
Society & Regions -
Warehousing and the distribution map
Where stock sits determines delivery time, working capital and how much of the country a company can actually serve. The map was redrawn after 2022.
Trade & Investment -
Ukraine Market Report — Q3 2021
A record harvest against a global energy price shock. The same quarter delivered the best agricultural conditions in the country's history and the worst gas import terms since…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Getting around a Ukrainian city
Ukrainian cities have excellent bones for public transport and have spent thirty years partly dismantling them. That is now reversing.
Society & Regions -
What things actually cost here
A practical comparison of the input costs that determine whether a manufacturing operation makes sense in Ukraine rather than in Poland, Romania or Turkey.
Economy & Macro -
Sport, clubs and civic identity
Sport in Ukraine carries civic weight beyond the results, and understanding the club structure explains a good deal about the cities they belong to.
Society & Regions -
Asphalt plant technology and the Ukrainian specification
Written from the trade: what a Ukrainian road programme asks of an asphalt plant, and the adaptations European technology needed to meet it.
Trade & Investment -
Financing a season
A farm spends everything in spring and earns everything in autumn. The gap between those two facts is the whole of agricultural finance.
Agriculture & Food -
Knowledge Day, 1 September 2021
A first-of-September greeting for a cohort returning to a yard they had barely seen.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Independence Day 2021: thirty years, measured honestly
Three decades of independence, a land market that finally opened in July, an energy price shock building in Europe, and a military build-up on the border that most…
National Days & Anniversaries -
Mourning customs and the memorial days
The relationship with the dead here is maintained on a schedule. Certain days belong to them, and on those days the cemetery is the busiest place in the…
Folklore & Esoterica -
The bridges: condition, replacement and the engineering backlog
A country has thousands of bridges and almost never thinks about them. They have design lives, and a large share of Ukraine's reached the end of theirs.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Road quality and the specification that changed it
Ukrainian roads improved noticeably in a short period. The reason is not more money; it is bitumen specification, laboratory control and warranty periods.
Energy & Infrastructure -
The registers a foreign company needs to read
Before signing anything here, a company can check who owns the counterparty, what it owes, whether it is in litigation and whether it actually owns the land. All…
Politics & Governance -
Processing: adding value at home
Exporting wheat earns a commodity price. Exporting flour, oil or confectionery earns that price plus the margin someone else is currently taking.
Agriculture & Food -
The oak, the willow and the viburnum
Three trees carry most of the symbolic weight in Ukrainian folk culture, and one of them ended up on shirts, in songs and on the coat of arms…
Folklore & Esoterica -
The farmland market opens: the first weeks, and the real constraint
After nineteen years of moratorium, Ukrainian citizens can buy agricultural land from 1 July. Prices are settling at a fraction of comparable EU levels, and the reason is…
Agriculture & Food -
Ukraine Market Report — Q2 2021
The agricultural land market opened on 1 July after two decades of prohibition. The first phase was deliberately narrow, and the point was to establish that transactions could…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Affordable loans and the small companies that used them
A state programme that subsidised interest and shared credit risk moved a large amount of lending to companies that banks would otherwise not have touched.
Economy & Macro -
Getting healthcare, in practice
The Ukrainian health system was rebuilt around a purchaser paying providers for defined services. What that means at the level of an actual patient is the useful part.
Society & Regions -
Ivana Kupala, 7 July 2021
A midsummer greeting for a night that came back after a year of not happening.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Veterinary and food establishment approval
Selling food into the European Union requires an approval that is granted to a specific building, not to a country or a company. That distinction explains a great…
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
Constitution Day, 28 June 2021
A greeting for Constitution Day, with a thought about amendment.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Fruit, berries and the shift up the value chain
Grain is sold by the tonne to a global market. Berries are sold by the punnet to a buyer who cares about the variety, the sugar level and…
Agriculture & Food -
The world's agricultural giant opens its land market: what it means for suppliers
The 2021 opening changed the economics of Ukrainian farming more than any subsidy could have. For input suppliers, equipment vendors and agricultural financiers, the practical consequences are specific.
Agriculture & Food -
The investment support institutions, assessed
There is an investment promotion agency, a large-project support law and a support package for qualifying investments. What they deliver is worth stating precisely.
Trade & Investment -
Hutsul craft: wood, brass and colour
The Carpathian highland tradition produces objects that are immediately recognisable and almost never plain. The reasons are geographic before they are aesthetic.
Folklore & Esoterica -
Keeping the soil that everything depends on
Ukraine's black earth is the asset behind the entire agricultural sector, and it is being depleted by the way that sector currently operates.
Agriculture & Food -
Where foreign direct investment actually went
The FDI record shows what foreign investors actually believed, as distinct from what they said at conferences, and the pattern is informative.
Trade & Investment -
Vyshyvanka Day 2021
The third Thursday of May, and the year the shirts appeared on video calls instead of in corridors.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Precision farming on a Ukrainian scale
When a single field is measured in hundreds of hectares, small per-hectare savings become large absolute ones. That is what makes precision agriculture pay here.
Agriculture & Food -
The motanka doll and the faceless figure
A cloth doll made without a needle and deliberately without a face. Both of those rules are the whole point of it.
Folklore & Esoterica -
The IT workforce and how it was built
Ukraine has a software industry considerably larger than its economy would predict. The reasons are specific and they are not the ones usually given.
Society & Regions -
Fixing the renewable support scheme
A generous feed-in tariff attracted the investment it was designed to attract, then ran out of money to pay it. The restructuring is a lesson in incentive design.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Rural Ukraine, described without romance
A Ukrainian village is not a picture of traditional life. It is a household economy under demographic pressure, and describing it accurately means describing the arithmetic.
Society & Regions -
Easter, 2 May 2021
An Easter greeting for a second spring of restrictions, and what the basket did instead of the crowd.
National Days & Anniversaries -
The regional map of the embroidered shirt
A vyshyvanka is not one thing. The colour, the stitch and the placement change from region to region, and a specialist can read a shirt like a document.
Folklore & Esoterica -
The Dnipro as a grain corridor
A barge carries what dozens of lorries would, at a fraction of the fuel. Ukraine has a large navigable river and used it very little.
Agriculture & Food -
Renewables before and after
Ukraine built a substantial renewable sector quickly using a generous support scheme, then discovered what happens when a support scheme is too generous.
Energy & Infrastructure -
Standards convergence, from a machinery supplier view
Ukraine replaced a Soviet standards system with European standards. For a machinery supplier that removed a genuine barrier and created a period of confusion.
Trade & Investment -
Ukraine Market Report — Q1 2021
Recovery from the pandemic contraction, rising global commodity prices lifting export earnings, and preparation for a land market that would open in July after twenty years of prohibition.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Odesa as a port city and a market
A city built to be a port has a commercial character that outlasts any particular trade. Odesa has been through several and has kept the character.
Society & Regions -
The didukh: a sheaf in the corner of the room
On Christmas Eve a sheaf of wheat is brought into the house and stood in the corner of honour. It is one of the oldest surviving objects in…
Folklore & Esoterica -
The IT sector that grew while everything else argued
Software services became one of Ukraine's largest exports during a period when very little else was going well. The reasons are worth understanding because they are not the…
Economy & Macro -
What Ukraine actually produces
The economy is usually described by whatever sector is in the news. The composition of output is a more useful starting point and it has shifted substantially.
Economy & Macro -
Dnipro: industry, engineering and adaptation
A heavy industrial city with an engineering tradition, an unusually entrepreneurial business culture and a recent role nobody planned for it.
Society & Regions -
The nuclear fleet and the fuel switch
Ukraine generates a very large share of its electricity from nuclear power using Soviet-designed reactors. Changing who supplies the fuel for those reactors took fifteen years and is…
Energy & Infrastructure -
The Common Aviation Area agreement
An aviation agreement is not about aircraft. It is about who is allowed to fly which route, and changing that changes an economy.
EU & Euro-Atlantic Integration -
What the pandemic revealed about a health system built for a different century
Ukraine entered the pandemic with more hospital beds per head than most of Europe and worse outcomes than almost all of it. The contradiction explains the reform that…
Society & Regions -
Digital government and the state in a phone
Ukraine built one of the most complete citizen-facing digital states anywhere. The interesting part is not the app; it is what had to exist underneath it.
Politics & Governance -
International Women's Day 2021
A greeting in a year when flowers were bought with a mask on and delivered at arm's length.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Judicial reform, attempt by attempt
Ukraine has reformed its judiciary repeatedly. Understanding why it took several attempts explains more than any single verdict on whether it worked.
Politics & Governance -
Domestic gas production and the road to self-sufficiency
Ukraine produces most of the gas it uses and has spent two decades trying to close the remainder. The obstacle has been drilling capacity and licensing, not geology.
Energy & Infrastructure -
The land market opens
For twenty years agricultural land in Ukraine could not be sold. In July 2021 that ended, under conditions designed to answer the fears that had kept the ban…
Agriculture & Food -
Ukraine Annual Review 2020: a contraction that tested the 2015 repairs
A pandemic contraction, a capital flow reversal and an institutional dispute — and a financial system that absorbed all three without becoming part of the problem.
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Day of Unity, 22 January 2021
A unity day greeting in a year when a chain of people holding hands was not something anyone could organise.
National Days & Anniversaries -
Ukraine Market Report — Q4 2020
A constitutional court decision in October struck down parts of the asset declaration system, producing a dispute over institutional authority that took months to resolve and cost the…
Quarterly & Annual Reports -
Christmas, 7 January 2021
A Christmas greeting for a year when the twelve dishes were cooked for fewer people than usual.
National Days & Anniversaries -
New Year, 1 January 2021
A new year greeting after a year spent mostly indoors, and a note on the smallest new year I have seen here.
National Days & Anniversaries
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