As Ukraine is celebrating its independence day, economists should be worried, as the country's economy has fallen to the point of no return.
Out of 166 countries that provided full access to their GDP data between 1991-2014, only five countries showed a decrease in GDP — Central African Republic (-0.94 percent), Zimbabwe (-2.3 percent), Georgia (-15.4 percent), Moldova (-29 percent) and Ukraine — an astonishing 35 percent drop since 1991.
Amusingly, back in 1987 Ukraine's GDP was only 4 times smaller than that of China. In early 2015, it was already 80 times smaller, and the reason behind it was not solely due to China's economic growth over the past two decades, ZN said.
This horrible turn of events isn't the result of a Civil War in Donbass. The process started much earlier, when Ukraine lost a large part of its domestic production. During the first decade of its independence, Ukraine lost almost 60 percent of its GDP, which was twice as much as the United States did during the Great Depression in the 1930s, ZN said.
The main reason behind the collapse of the Ukrainian economy is technological degradation, as a result of which the country ended up being dependent on the export of natural resources and the fluctuation of the dollar and the euro.
