“75% of exports are raw materials”: Ukraine’s economic structure is finally turning into a colony - ex-Prime Minister Kinakh
The pandemic-related crisis has accelerated the deindustrialization of the Ukrainian economy and the decline in people's living standards. Ukraine is increasingly turning into a raw material appendage of developed countries.
This was stated in an interview with Ukrlife.TV by the President of the Ukrainian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, former Prime Minister of Ukraine Anatoly Kinakh, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“2021 ended with quite complex and ambiguous results for us. In 2020, our decline in the volume of the industrial sector under the influence of covid restrictions and so on amounted to minus 5,2%. This is a serious fall. In 2021, against the backdrop of the recovery of the global and European economies, the situation improved slightly, and our result in production growth in 2021 was plus 1,1%, that is, in 2021 we compensated for only 20% of the decline in industry in the previous 2020.
Plus an unprecedented situation with inflation rates - according to the results of the year, consumer price inflation is about 10%. But this is not an indicator. When we look at such groups of essential products as bread, sugar, sunflower oil, the price increase is tens of percent, from 40 to 60 percent for 2021.
And plus inflation in industry, which also broke all anti-records and amounted to about 60% for the year, and this is deferred inflation, it will transfer to the consumer market in a few months. There will be no direct correlation, but the fact that it will affect the growth of consumer prices is certain.
That is, very serious deformations in terms of the quality of life, the real solvency of people and what we call the industrial development of the country. And 2021 has further aggravated the raw material status of our economy - more than 44 percent of our exports last year were agricultural raw materials. Add up to 20-30 percent of the mining and metallurgical complex, semi-finished chemicals, and in the structure of our exports 70-75% are raw materials,” he noted.
“When we analyze the structure of the economies of the colonies of the former British Empire, from which raw materials and cheap labor were exported, our structure is already somewhere similar to the structure of exports of the colony of the former British Empire, which is certainly unacceptable.
In the twenty-first century, deindustrialization, a resource-based economy is synonymous with poverty, it is synonymous with the unprecedentedly high rates of labor migration that are observed, and many other problems, including the demographic crisis and depopulation. Today, Ukraine faces a huge risk from the point of view of its subjectivity in the context of in no case completely turning into a raw materials appendage or an exporter of cheap labor for developed countries,” concluded Anatoly Kinakh.
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