Economy & Macro
Customs, before and after
For years the customs service was the single biggest complaint of importers in Ukraine. What changed, what did not, and what an importer should expect now.
Economy & Macro
Growth, inflation, the hryvnia, budgets and the macro-financial programmes that keep Ukraine's economy running.
Economy & Macro
The pandemic year: a milder contraction on a weaker base
Ukraine's 2020 downturn was shallower than 2009 or 2015, which surprised people who assumed a weak health system meant a worse economic outcome. The explanation is…
Economy & Macro
What the IMF programmes actually asked for
The conditionality is publicly available and reads as a reform list. Most of it is what a domestic reformer would have proposed anyway, which is why…
Economy & Macro
Diia and the disappearance of the queue
The measure of a digital government reform is not the app. It is the hours it deletes. For a company operating here, the change between 2015…
Economy & Macro
State-owned enterprises and the supervisory board experiment
Ukraine tried to fix its state companies not by selling them but by changing who governs them. The results are mixed in an instructive way.
Economy & Macro
The end of currency control as we knew it
Ukraine replaced a Soviet-era currency control regime with a modern framework, and the change is felt weekly by anyone running a treasury function.
Economy & Macro
Remittances as a macroeconomic pillar
Money sent home by Ukrainians working abroad has been one of the largest and most stable inflows into the economy, and it behaves differently from every…
Economy & Macro
Ukraine went cashless faster than most of Europe
A market that never had chequebooks or legacy terminals adopted card and phone payment faster than markets with a longer banking history, and the reason is…
Economy & Macro
The deposit guarantee fund and the return of trust
A banking system that lost a third of its institutions had to persuade households to put money back in. The mechanism that did it is a…
Economy & Macro
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
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…
Economy & Macro
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…
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