FOREIGN ECONOMIC STRATEGIC PRIORITIES OF UKRAINE

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the analysis of modern foreign economic strategic priorities of Ukraine, features of their implementation in the context of the key purposes of economic development of the country. Emphasis is placed on the need to use modern tools to support domestic producers and limit import expansion in the context of the formation of a new export strategy of Ukraine. Ukraine is a small open economy that makes extensive use of external factors of economic development both in the context of markets for its products, especially the agricultural sector, and attracting important resources of critical imports, including oil and natural gas, electronic equipment and more. From this point of view, the analysis has revealed the role and importance of two key players in the world market – the United States and China – in ensuring Ukraine’s external economic balance. The paper empirically examines the dependence of certain macroeconomic indicators of Ukraine on similar indicators of the United States and China (the so-called ‘large’ and systemically important economies for Ukraine). Vector autoregression models were used as a research tool to explore the dynamic interdependencies between macroeconomic indicators in the case of explaining their present values by the previous ones. For this purpose, percentage changes in gross domestic product and consumer price index compared to the corresponding period of the previous year for the USA, China and Ukraine were selected. As a result of the research, impulse-response functions from ‘large’ economies showed the dependence of indicators that characterise economic development in Ukraine from them and their long-term absorption, both in the context of economic growth in these countries and inflation imports from abroad. Moreover, it should be noted that the influence of China is more significant than that of the United States, especially if we consider the impact of fluctuations in the consumer price index in China on economic growth and inflation in Ukraine. This necessitates further research on this issue in line with the formation of scientifically sound foreign economic strategy and policy of Ukraine. The impact of economic growth in the United States and China on Ukraine’s GDP fluctuations is positive and almost the same (peaking in the second quarter and gradual levelling over two years). In turn, the variance decomposition of forecast errors for Ukraine’s GDP shows that in the long run about 52% of its variability result from modelled external factors, which in our opinion is due to significant openness of Ukraine’s economy and, consequently, ‘large’ economies. Finally, paper emphasizes the need to assess their international economic policy to minimize risks in the implementation of the country’s foreign economic strategy.