Of course, GDP Per capita doesn’t account for income inequality which is far worse in Ukraine than China.
The same thing they want to happen again in the 2020s, no joke straight from Zelensky they want a repeat of the liberalization on the bits of the economy still under nominal state control in Ukraine like agriculture.
All the Eastern Bloc states have similar curves. Not just a “temporary hiccup” in the adjustment from socialism to capitalism. The ones who were able to more quickly and seamlessly integrate into the imperial core (i.e. the Baltic states) saw a shallower curve than the states that were excluded from that but still had the wonders of capitalism forced on them (Russia, Ukraine), but they all experienced it.
I feel this is an important counterpoint to westerners who talk about how communism “has always failed when attempted”. Like, people in the USSR had a certain standard of living under communism. It took capitalism like 2 decades just to get to where things were under communism in Russia proper just from a national GDP perspective (I suspect, given income inequality, a working class Russian today is still worse off than they were in 1990). And in Ukraine, things have never recovered even from this angle. How is this not an obvious failure of capitalism?
The GDP per capita is purposely misleading, Ukrainian population is on a massive decline ever since the end of the USSR source. It hit a peak right at the end of the USSR after a solid 4 decades of growth.
Literaly richer per capita because there are fewer Ukrainians though I’m sure there is more detailed analysis somewhere. As far as the Marxist analysis though Ukraine never recovered from the shock therapy so this is completely meaningless, see Ukraine: the invasion of capital
Interestingly, it looks like the population growth rate was lowering slowly from the 50’s due to a steadily increasing mortality rate, which was then exacerbated by a precipitous drop in birth rate around the years of the collapse. Bonk
Interested to know what happened in that uptick post-2000 – is that just due to foreign investment?
Ukraine has had a negative population growth rate since 1991.
That’s a combo of more Western capital projects as the state companies were sold off and a decreased population to spread that unequally distributed wealth across.
The collapse of the Soviet Union has been a disaster for the human race
