UKRAINE has just released balance-of-payments data for August. In Ukraine-terms, at least, it makes for good reading. Exports are rising and the country is running both current-account and budget surpluses. The reserves of the National Bank of Ukraine are rising, and the finance ministry has a record level of $2.2bn in its Treasury account. Pretty impressive.
The NBU reckons that by the fourth quarter of this year, the Ukrainian economy will be growing again (in dollar terms the economy has more than halved over the last year or so). This may be an optimistic forecast; things still look pretty terrible. The following chart shows industrial production, retail sales and exports (in American dollars), all of which are shown as a year-on-year change. Ukraine has moved away from the depths of economic despair of a few months ago, but they hardly look great:
Also I am not sure that Ukraine should boast too much about its twin surpluses. As Timothy Ash of Nomura argues,
On the current-account side, the collapse in domestic demand and deep recession has slashed imports, more than making up for the collapse also in...Continue reading
from Economics http://ift.tt/1L6MyCR
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment