Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center Resident Senior Fellow Anders Åslund writes for Vox Ukraine on the steps necessary to achieve economic growth in Ukraine:
Ukraine needs a smaller and better state that delivers more welfare to its citizens and costs them less. In particular, the state must not cause the citizen so much hardship. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assessed Ukraine’s public expenditures at 53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), while the successful countries in this region have public expenditures of around 35 percent of GDP, for example, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria.
The other states have grown nicely and now have a GDP per capita that is much higher than Ukraine’s, sometimes up to three times (Poland and Estonia), while Ukraine’s GDP per capita has tragically fallen by one quarter since 1990 according to World Bank statistics.; Clearly, Ukraine is on the wrong track, and its excessive public expenditures are a prime issue.