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the service. At the same time, consumer confidence worsened from - 27.1% to -29.1% and business confidence in processing industry worsened from -3.9% to -4.8%. The agency said that in the third quarter of 2017, the indicator of economic sentiment was 103.9%, but in the fourth quarter it dropped to 100.4%. The indicator is calculated according to the methodology for calculating business expectations indicators in accordance with the requirements of the expanded International Monetary Fund Special Data Dissemination Standard, updated by the State Statistics Service in December 2017.
Ukraine's two-time former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko remains the leader of the presidential electoral rating in Ukraine , while heads of the Civil Position party Anatoliy Hrytsenko and the pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party Yuriy Boiko follow her, according to the results of the social research conducted by Kyiv-based research agency Seetarget .
Tymoshenko has the support of 17.9% of Ukrainians who said they will vote in the next presidential election (11.4% of all respondents), according to the survey conducted from July 26 through August 17, Interfax news agency reported on August 27.
Seetarget is partly controlled by Jason Jay Smart, a US political consultant, former resident country director of the International Republican Institute in Russia, reports bne IntelliNews correspondent in Kyiv. According to unconfirmed reports by Ukrainian media, currently, Smart advises former head of the SBU security service Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who is Tymoshenko's close associate.
According to the survey, 13.8% of those polled who plan to go to the polls (8.7% among all respondents) are ready to vote for the leader of Hrytsenko, while 11.2% (7.5%) will vote for Boiko, 9.8% (6.1%) for the Radical Party Oleh Liashko, 9.1% (6%) for incumbent President Petro Poroshenko.
Some 16.9% of respondents who are ready to take part in the voting said that they would support another politician who was not on the list proposed, and 30.6% found it difficult to answer. Some 5.1% of respondents said that they would not go to the president election.
Poroshenko has the greatest anti-rating among Ukrainians: 50.2% of respondents said they would not vote for Poroshenko under any circumstances. The leader of the People's Front Party Arseniy Yatsenyuk (31.6%) comes next, followed by Tymoshenko (23.9%), Liashko (20.5%), Boiko (18.6%), Leader of the Svoboda party Oleh Tiahnybok (17.5%), and Rabinovych (17.2%), according to Interfax.
Some 77% of respondents polled by Seetarget believe that the most urgent problem for Ukraine is the military conflict in the eastern part of the country.
Half of the respondents believe that corruption and bribes are the main problem, one third of respondents pointed out the unemployment rate, 19% - low salaries and pensions and 16% - not enough level of social protection.
Among the most important personal problems the respondents named low wages and pensions (52% of respondents), tariff hikes (49%), price hikes and inflation (45%). At the same time, a quarter of respondents are personally concerned about the military conflict in the east of the country, and the unemployment problem is a concern of 23% of respondents.
The main threats for Ukrainians, according to the respondents, are economic collapse (60%), impoverishment of the population (55%), activation of
12 UKRAINE Country Report September 2018 www.intellinews.com