Growth Experience in Ukraine during Twenty Years of Independence: Business Cycle Accounting Perspective

This paper studies the macroeconomic performance of Ukraine since 1991. During last twenty years, Ukraine experienced three episodes of prolonged recessions. The project uses business cycle accounting methodology developed by Chari et al. (2007) to identify driving forces behind economic downturns and growth episodes experienced in recent years. Ukrainian government needs to develop policies for sustainable growth. The research project studies this issue in two dimensions. First, the analysis within a general equilibrium framework identifies distortions which are the most harmful to the economic growth and will help to design future policies. Secondly, the wedges estimated from the data take into account not only legislatively declared taxes, for example, labor income taxes, but also incorporate institutional distortions in the labor market such as hiring and firing costs, expenditures associated with regulations’ compliance. We also estimate the contribution of each wedge to each crisis episode and to subsequent recovery.