Page 15 - UKRRptFeb19

The Ministry of Finance of Ukraine successfully placed $2bn of Eurobonds on October 21, which provided enough FX funds to repay external debt through May 2019.
The government has also said that it expects to tap the bond markets for up to $2bn in 2019, although this borrowing might not be necessary.
The IMF is expected to consider releasing the next tranches from the $3.4b facility in May and November, according to the country’s Finance Ministry.
The World Bank also approved a $750mn “policy-based guarantee” for Ukraine “to support important reforms in banking, anti-corruption, agricultural land, pensions, utility subsidies, and healthcare.” The guarantee is expected to help Ukraine raise $1bn on international markets, the lender said.
The new IMF deal clears the way for other loans from the EU and World Bank among others that were tied to a successful conclusion in talks with the IMF.
2.7 Ukraine does well in bne IntelliNews’s Despair index
bne IntelliNews h as updated its despair index that brings together inflation, unemployment and poverty.
bne IntelliNews i nvented the despite index in a piece entitled “ The poverty of nations ” in 2011 as a way to better compare the pain of transition.
The problem is the classic “Misery Index” is simply the sum of inflation and unemployment. Economists use it as a shorthand to judge how painful a crisis or slowdown is for the lower half of the population. But this index doesn't fully capture the pain of the transition countries following the collapse of the socialist experiment in 1991.
In the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union poverty soared to as high as 60% of the population in some places. Since then it has recovered dramatically, but remains very unevenly distributed. One of the ironies of transition is that those countries that didn't make a shock change to capitalism and kept their unreformed Soviet institutions functioning, such as Belarus, have done much better at containing poverty than those that made a complete change like the Baltic states.
The battle against poverty recolours the politics of transformation. While the economic experts at the IMF and other western institutions talk about the need to put the economy on a market footing, what that did is thrown an entire generation – those aged around 45 or older in 1991 – under the bus, who were incapable of adapting to the new realities. And even if they were, no one in the new companies wanted to employ them. Far easier to train young people as everyone had to be retrained.
The despair index is the simple addition of the poverty rate, inflation and unemployment. In an idea world the index number should be around 4% (0% poverty, 2% inflation and 2% unemployment).
What is unnerving is not even the richest and most developed countries have been able to eradicate poverty, which was 17.3% in the EU in 2018. The best any country in the EU has managed in the last decade was France, which got it down to 15%.
15 UKRAINE Country Report February 2019 www.intellinews.com