Economy & Macro
What 2014 and 2015 taught about balance sheets
The second currency shock in six years destroyed companies that had survived the first one, and the reason was almost always the same line on the…
Economy & Macro
Growth, inflation, the hryvnia, budgets and the macro-financial programmes that keep Ukraine's economy running.
Economy & Macro
The 2015 restructuring: what the GDP warrants really cost
A twenty per cent haircut, four years of maturity extension and higher coupons — plus an instrument that pays creditors a share of future growth. The…
Economy & Macro
The last year of the old model: a review written at the end of one era
The economic model in place since the early 2000s reached the end of what it could deliver. Reviewing the year makes the exhaustion visible: every component…
Economy & Macro
An economy that stopped growing, and the three reasons why
By 2013 Ukrainian output had stalled without any single dramatic event to explain it. The causes were structural, they had been visible for years, and they…
Economy & Macro
When the growth number is worse than it looks: reading the composition instead
A headline output figure close to zero can describe several very different situations. Breaking it into its components showed an economy in worse condition than the…
Economy & Macro
An old balance-of-payments problem, and why it kept coming back
Every Ukrainian government of the period inherited the same external accounts problem and treated it as an inherited misfortune. It was structural, it was predictable, and…
Economy & Macro
Privatisation: three waves, and what each one produced
Vouchers that made everyone a nominal owner of nothing, insider sales that created the industrial groups, and transparent auctions that finally produced market prices. The difference…
Economy & Macro
The cost of defending a currency peg, and who eventually pays it
Ukraine held the hryvnia at a fixed rate against the dollar for years after the underlying balance had stopped supporting it. The defence was expensive, the…
Economy & Macro
Ukraine and the IMF: the pattern across eight programmes
Programmes are agreed, the first tranche arrives, one or two conditions prove politically impossible, reviews slip, the programme goes off track and is renegotiated. Understanding why…
Economy & Macro
Emerging-market story or special case? The framing determines the analysis
Whether you treat Ukraine as one member of a broad emerging-market class or as a country requiring its own model changes almost every conclusion you reach…
Economy & Macro
The wealth ranking a year on: what moved, and what the movement actually tells you
Published rich lists are read as gossip and are more useful as sector data. Year-on-year changes in the largest fortunes are a rough but revealing indicator…
Economy & Macro
How large capital is organised in Ukraine, and what it means for an entrant
Half a dozen financial-industrial groups, assembled from privatisations in the 1990s, holding metals, energy, chemicals, banking and media in the same structures. Understanding the pattern matters…
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