“After three years of heroic reforms following the Euro-Maidan, Ukraine has restored macroeconomic stability. The economy is growing again, but far too slowly. The expected growth is 2.5 percent in 2017. But it should swing up to 6 to 8 percent, as it was for eight years in the early 2000s. The key now is more investment.

“During the crisis, Ukraine’s investment ratio fell precipitously. It was merely 16 percent of GDP in 2016, while it ought to be 25-30 percent of GDP for a country at Ukraine’s level of development and great need for infrastructure investment.

“Ukraine’s investment fell mainly because of war and Russia’s extensive trade sanctions… In the last three years, FDI [foreign direct investment] was close to zero in real terms.

“The Ukrainian government and the international community can and should do a lot to remedy this. The government should pursue privatizations that interest foreign investors, while improving its business climate by speeding up its judicial reforms. The international community should block further Russian aggression and provide more investment funding. …

“There has been a lot of talk about international aid for Ukraine, but in reality it has been tiny. Ukraine’s public debt shrunk from $73 billion at the end of 2013 to $71 billion three years later, showing that there have been no net international inflows to Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund has disbursed $7.7 billion of its successful stabilization program of March 2015, but other international support has been much more limited than a casual newspaper reader might presume. …”

– Anders Aslund writing on February 1 in an article titled “Ukraine Needs Investment, Not Just Solidarity: Time for International Donors to Pony Up” that was published on the Atlantic Council website (see http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-needs-investment-not-just-solidarity-time-for-international-donors-to-pony-up).