Kommentarii reports that Ukraine doubled its GDP in the past decade, according to a recent IMF statistical release on the per capita growth of GDP based on the Consumer Purchasing Power Parity index, according to KW.
The latest IMF statistics suggest that Ukraine managed to double per capita GDP over the past 10 years based on PPP. Two moments are worth noting here. Firstly, Ukraine did not recover to the level of 2008 according to the PPP index, and secondly, the impression is that the higher the macroeconomic indicators the lower is the nation’s place in global ratings.
Indeed, a decade of high prices of oil and gas allowed Vladimir Putin to fulfill his promise of doubling GDP. At the very least, the IMF data prove that the PPP index in Russia doubled over that period to US $17,687. In other words, one can presume that the Russian economy today is 2.5 times stronger than the economy of Ukraine.
The growth indicators of neighboring Belarus are simply astronomical with a 2.7-time improvement to US $16,088. For those who are at least familiar with all the financial and currency upheavals in the Belarus economy starting from the second half of 2010, this fact was a truly surprising discovery.
Russia is one spot lower than tiny Croatia in the IMF rating and the islands of Antigua and Barbados in the Caribbean are breathing down Russia’s neck. It turns out that the per capita GDP growth statistics of the IMF is very close to the notorious “Big Mac Index” in which the place in the rating depends on the internal prices of fast food joints. In other words, attractive sounding figures can only be applied together with other data. However, in Ukraine the notion of rising GDP has been cultivated for a number of years.
