Page 28 - UKRRptSept22

Almost 65,000 Ukrainian enterprises remain in the occupied territories.
About 65,000 businesses (5% of the total legal entities in Ukraine) work in the temporarily occupied territories, reportedOpendatabot. With the start of a full-scale war on Ukrainian territory, businesses were forced not only to review their business processes but also to change their place of registration in order to start operations again. The businesses that remain in the territories that fall under one of the following statuses, temporarily occupied, surrounded or blocked, or where active hostilities continue, can apply for a simplified taxation scheme. Moreover, according to Raiffeisen Bank, taxes on the income received are calculated and paid not by the entrepreneur but by his counterparties.
The financial stability of businesses has slightly improved. The number of companies that claim that their monetary reserves are sufficient for a period of more than a year has increased from 19% to 30% since May, the EBA reported. Currently, 30% of companies claim that their financial reserves will be enough for more than a year, while in May, it was 19%. Namely, 48% assess their financial stability to be enough for half a year, and another 16% claim reserves sufficient for a year. Of them, 49% have fully resumed their activities, and 51% have partially resumed. Among the companies operating at less than full operation, 44% had to reduce the geographic area of their activities, 20% had to close some of their offices or retail outlets, and 18% had to switch to online operation. Unfortunately, business continues to experience losses with each day of the war. Thus, in five months of Russian aggression, 41% of companies suffered losses of up to $1M, 32% estimated losses in the range of $1-$10M, and 18% reported losses of more than $10M.
4.5 Labour and income
4.5.1 Labour market, unemployment dynamics
The war has forced the country’s unemployment rate to jump threefold to an “unprecedented” level of 35%, or 5.2mn people, due to a “sharp decline in economic activity and migration from the front-line regions,” according to a recent report published by the National Bank of Ukraine.
The International Labour Organisation puts the number of unemployed at closer to 4.8mn, or around 30% of pre-war employment in Ukraine.
Experts say these figures can hardly give a real picture of unemployment in the country. The war has either destroyed thousands of businesses or forced them to close, displacing workers internally and abroad. And in the country’s centre and west, the labour market is slowly coming back to life.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, around 10mn people, or more than a third of Ukraine’s population, have either been displaced internally or have become refugees abroad. Large numbers of people who are out of work are still considered officially employed on paper, according to Tetyana Pashkina, an expert on Ukraine’s labour market. For the first six months of this year, the number of officially registered jobless people was only 656,000, which is 23% less compared to 2021 and a far cry from themns of people the National Banks says have lost their jobs during the war.
28 UKRAINE Country Report September 2022 www.intellinews.com