Goals and achievements
Ukraine ranks 85 out of 178 countries in terms of human development, down from 45
In late September New York will host a top-level UN General Assembly where global leaders will discuss progress towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals. President Viktor Yanukovych will deliver a speech there, which he recently presented in Kyiv.
Given how Ukraine has been performing on fulfilling the 2000-15 UN goals, the authors of this document analyzed the consequences of state policies of the past decade, and reasoned to what to do in terms of new programs.
For Ukraine these goals include: overcoming poverty, securing high-quality lifelong education, gender equality, lower infant mortality, better health of mothers, curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, reversing the trends of these epidemics, as well as environmental development.
In 2009 the share of Ukrainian citizens whose daily consumption (corrected for purchasing power parity) was below 4.5 dollars (and is expected to reach five dollars by 2010), have shrunk to 0.5 percent in 2009 and thus will virtually disappear by 2015. During this period the proportion of the population whose consumption is below the subsistence level is to fall from 22 percent (in 2009) to seven percent. The new matrix of Ukraine’s development goals found in the speech made it possible to use an optimistic subheading “We Can Overcome Poverty.”
How many nice plans have we had in our history that stayed on paper? The authors of the speech on new goals made an objective and thorough analysis of progress in fulfilling the tasks during the previous decade, and came to the conclusion that the positive effect of the economic growth of 1999-2008 reduced the scale of absolute poverty. However, it did not, they believe, the situation regarding relative poverty because the government failed to stop the process of income stratification. The trend towards inequality that emerged in the 1990s became increasingly entrenched. According to the authors, the policy of overcoming poverty that has been implemented in Ukraine since 2001 did not bring the expected results. In the entire subsequent period two major problems remained unresolved: reducing the risk of poverty among families with children and rural population, which is separated from the urban population by a true abyss. The worst situation among households without children is traditionally recorded for cases in which all household members are older than 75. In 2008 this sector had the highest level of poverty (29 percent) since 2000, which the authors of the report believe is a direct indicator that the purchasing power of minimum pension payments decreased.
What recommendations for fighting poverty are offered to the Ukrainian government by this report? In particular, it says that it is impossible to tax the subsistence-level incomes and that a number of taxes (wealth tax, extra real estates tax, inheritance tax, etc.) have to be introduced. It is recommended that the government eyes closely underprivileged population better with its social support and use the funds allotted for these purposes in a more efficient way.
Ela Libanova, a member of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute of Demographic and Social Research, offered interesting complementary material to the analysis of the progress made towards millennium development goals in Ukraine. She compared progress in this area with Progress index. She says that in Ukraine this index is 0.796 at present — higher than the world average but lower than in other Central and Eastern Europe and CIS countries. In economically developed countries, she adds, this index reaches 0.932. It is 0.821 in Central and Eastern Europe and CIS countries.
At the same time, Ukraine’s education index is 0.96. “We did better than many countries that belong to the first group, such as Switzerland, Great Britain, Liechtenstein, and Japan. In other words, in terms of education everything seams to be great,” says Libanova. She also emphasized that in terms of the education index, Ukraine is first among the countries with a medium level of human potential development (a group to which it belongs).
Meanwhile, Libanova says that Ukraine is significantly behind developed countries in terms of average life expectancy, while in 1960 our country ranked 7th worldwide and was even ahead of Japan and Germany. Now it ranks second from the bottom among Central and Eastern European countries. It is not without sarcasm that Libanova notes: “There is no country in the world in which people would live long but poor lives.”
