Main Trends over Twenty-Five Years: Delayed Reforms Lead to Poor Performance

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the long-term evolution of the economy since independence compared to other transition countries. The bottom line is well known to observers of Ukraine: reforms moved quite slowly and the economy performed very poorly, lagging behind most of CEB, and even behind some FSU countries. A thorough description of this past history is a relatively easy task today, with plenty of quantitative and qualitative evidence available after twenty-five years. A much more difficult but perhaps more important task is to explain why Ukraine’s performance lagged so far behind; the answers are sought in the rest of the book. However, this chapter already provides a tentative hypothesis by showing an apparent visual correlation between slow reforms and poor performance. The chapter begins by demonstrating this for the entire post-communist era.