Ukraine in ten reads
If this is your first visit, let me do the ordering. These ten pieces set the frame: what the country produces, where it came from, and where it stands now. Read in sequence, the rest of the archive makes far more sense.
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Step 1
Why a market of forty million deserves attention, and why it usually does not get it
Ukraine is one of the largest consumer markets in Europe by population and one of the least covered by the companies that should be looking at it. The reasons for that gap are mostly…
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Step 2
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.
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Step 3
Two currency crises, three shocks and a war, on one page
Two currency crises, three external shocks and a war. What survived all of them is a small number of institutions, and that is the story.
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Step 4
The regional map of Ukrainian output
Ukraine is often discussed as one economy. It is more usefully understood as several, with very different structures, and the differences explain most of what happens politically and commercially.
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Step 5
Governance, measured from where the country started
A fair assessment measures against where a country started, not against an ideal. On that basis the record is neither the triumph nor the failure it is usually described as.
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Step 6
From neighbourhood policy to accession chapters
From a neighbourhood policy that offered almost nothing to negotiating accession chapters. Measured over twenty years the trajectory is clearer than it looked at any point along it.
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Step 7
The fields: barter, debt, and then a world market
From barter, debt and abandoned fields to a top-five global exporter. The transformation was real, and it had specific causes.
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Step 8
What was built, what was left to decay, and what held
What was built, what was allowed to decay, and what the last four years demonstrated about which of the two mattered.
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Step 9
Daily life, as a long-term guest saw it change
A long-term foreign resident's account of what changed in daily life, which is a different record from the one made by statistics.
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Step 10
How to read a country report without being misled by it
Doing Business rankings, competitiveness indices, risk ratings and bank research all describe the same country and disagree substantially. Understanding what each one measures explains why, and makes them useful again.
Once a month, new pieces only
One email a month: what was written that month, and one older piece from the archive. I send nothing else.
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