In a sign of Ukraine's widening socioeconomic gap, the number of official hryvna millionaires increased dramatically last year, even as more than 90 percent of Ukrainians continued to wallow below the poverty line
In a sign of Ukraine’s widening socioeconomic gap, the number of official hryvna millionaires increased dramatically last year, even as more than 90 percent of Ukrainians continued to wallow below the poverty line.
According to Oleksy Shytrya, deputy head of the State Tax Administration, 1,221 Ukrainians reported incomes in excess of Hr 1 million last year. That’s more than a 30-fold increase on 1999, when just 40 people admitted to incomes of Hr 1 million or more.
Shytrya said that 171 people posted incomes higher than Hr 5 million (about $1 million) last year. More than 5,000 people declared incomes of at least Hr 200,000.
The numbers might not mean much, though. STA spokesman Vitaly Lukyanenko said the statistics were due more to a growing willingness among Ukrainians to legalize and declare their earnings, rather than a sudden spurt in income among Ukraine’s wealthy class.
“We see this as one of the elements of a growing taxpayer culture in Ukraine,” Lukyanenko said.
A poll conducted in February showed that the vast majority of Ukrainians live on the other end of the earnings spectrum. Of 1,200 Ukrainians polled by Socis Gallup and the Democratic Initiatives Fund, 93 percent said that their personal monthly incomes were less than Hr 300 – slightly less than the Hr 311 monthly subsistence level established by the government.
Many respondents indicated that they were doing much worse than that. Seventy percent of those polled put their monthly incomes at lower than Hr 150.
More than a half of those questioned, or 56 percent, said they didn’t work. Those respondents included pensioners, students, unemployed persons and women on pregnancy leave. Of those who said they did work, 55 percent said they were state employees. The rest described themselves either as entrepreneurs or as employees of private companies.
