Dr. Anders Åslund | The Ukrainian economy: How vulnerable is it to Russian aggression?
Ukraine’s trade volumes with Russia are no longer significant, but its economy is highly vulnerable to Russian aggression. This vulnerability is not mitigated by the Ukrainian macroeconomic situation, which is the best it has been since 2011, with large international reserves, a small budget deficit, and limited public debt. On 14 January 2022 Ukrainian bond yields increased to the point that the country is effectively blocked from private international financing, and the hryvnia is falling by the day. In this situation, Ukraine's government needs to institute an anti-crisis program, with major reforms and ample financing from the international community.
Dr. Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Stockholm Free World Forum and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a leading specialist on economic policy in Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe. Dr. Åslund has served as an economic adviser to several governments, including those of Ukraine and the Russian Federation. He has authored fifteen books and edited sixteen others. His most recent book is Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (2019).
He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. He has worked at five Washington think tanks—the Atlantic Council, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Brookings Institution, and Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. He served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He earned his PhD from Oxford University, and is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
This lecture is organized by the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program, a research program of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton). CUSP’s mission is to develop contemporary Ukraine studies in the national Canadian and global intellectual contexts through cross-disciplinary and collaborative research, publishing, community involvement, and other projects that analyze the contemporary situation in Ukraine and within the broader comparative context of European, Transatlantic, Eurasian, Slavic, and post-Soviet studies.