Assessing the foreign economic security of Ukraine

Abstract

The study aims to assess the state of Ukraine’s foreign economic security and the challenges associated with its ensuring. The integrated assessment methodology of the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine was employed, which is based on a quantitative analysis of indicators that reflect the state of foreign economic security. It involves the characteristics of each indicator in terms of stimulators or destimulators, their normalization, and consideration of weighting coefficients. In order to identify the long-term trends, the official national accounts statistics, data from the World Bank, and the Economic Development Observatory for the period 2004–2023 were employed; the assessment is based on ten indicators. The results demonstrate that the main factors affecting the foreign economic security index are global economic crises, domestic political changes, and a full-scale war with russia. At the same time, the growth of foreign economic security is recorded in the period of stabilization during the implementation of structural reforms: 2005–2008 – the period after the Orange Revolution, 2014–2016 – the period of growth after the Revolution of Dignity, 2021 – post-pandemic recovery. In 2022–2023, the security index declined to 31.5% and 35.7%, respectively, as a consequence of the outbreak of a full-scale russian-Ukrainian war. The findings also emphasize the need to develop domestic capacities to ensure the sustainability of foreign economic activity, as well as the importance of maintaining and planning national export infrastructure in the face of global challenges. AcknowledgmentThis article is published as an output of the project VEGA 1/0392/23: “Changes in the approach to the development of distribution management concepts of companies influenced by the impact of social and economic crises caused by the global pandemic and increased security risks” and funded by the EU NextGenerationEU through the Recovery and Resilience Plan for Slovakia under the project No.09103-03-V01-00042.This study was financially supported by the NATO SPS Program “Security of territorial communities: evidence from the Eastern European countries”.In addition, this article is published as an output of the project “Economic bases for managing Ukraine’s debt security during martial law” (No. 0121U112685).