Ukrainian Political Economy

A painful, prolonged economic decline has been the most prominent aspect of post-independence Ukraine. A critical conditioning factor has been an extended crisis of governance at the center. The first five years of independence witnessed a struggle to enact a constitution, and especially to define the executive power embodied in the office of the president. Since the ratification of the constitution in 1996, however, the struggle has shifted to parliament, where reform was frustrated by a left majority of factions. Only after the parliamentary elections of 1998 has a presidential majority emerged with the votes to enact the president's reform program. In this book, Robert S. Kravchuk examines the first critical years of Ukrainian independence, and explores the root causes of Ukraine's chronic difficulties in enacting genuine economic reform. He interprets this unfortunate outcome as a "political power failure" brought on by unclear, overlapping and often incoherent governing arrangements in Kyiv. Kravchuk's book on the Ukrainian political economy interpretes the difficult transition process in this formerly socialist country as a problem in governmental institution-building; treats the interaction of economic and political factors as a coherent whole; and places the Ukrainian political and economic transition within the broader framework of the theoretical literature. In this way, Kravchuk examines the major and minor factors behind a crisis that has let the wealth of Ukraine increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, while the vast majority of citizens live at or near the subsistence level.