From space to the times of silent films – the arrows of Ukraine’s progress have moved backwards
All the years of Ukrainian independence, the country's technological degradation was observed, which ultimately led to economic collapse.
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Doctor of Economic Sciences, Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics and Forecasting of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Sergei Korablin talks about this in an article on the pages of the Kyiv weekly “Mirror of the Week”.
“Over the years of independence, the country has lost not just individual enterprises and scientific complexes, but entire industries. The era of incessant redistribution of other people's property, racketeering, kickbacks, raiding and protection rackets became the finest hour of the least picky. Both morally and technologically. Such concepts as microelectronics, machine tool building, instrument making, robots, and automation have disappeared from the domestic industry and vocabulary. Without their complex and expensive products, income dried up, related production disappeared, the treasury became scarce, international expectations and national prospects dissolved.
The arrows of progress in Ukraine have moved backwards. Its horizons went back from space programs to the time of silent films: metallurgy, simple chemistry, agriculture. But this “black and white post-industrial world” was unable to generate the same wages, employment, or scientific research. “On the street there was an army of useless engineers, technologists, mathematicians, physicists and chemists who disappeared into “earning jobs” and underground passages,” the economist points out.
According to him, the technological decline “gave” Ukraine not just a raw materials-based, small economy, but also a “fading economy.”
“During the years of independence, its weight in global production has decreased by 4–5 times. Today it hardly reaches 0,08% of world GDP, which is almost nine times less than Ukraine’s share in the global army of labor (0,7%). This gap is a conditional indicator of how much less the average Ukrainian produces and earns than his foreign colleagues. It can also be interpreted as an indicator of the excess of “extra” Ukrainians in the domestic labor market (in accordance with the level of average world productivity), Korablin summarizes.
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