An index rating 174 countries in terms of life expectancy, education and living standards has placed Ukraine in 102nd place, sandwiched between Mongolia and Turkmenistan.
The ranking places Ukraine way below its Eastern-bloc neighbours Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, and even below fellow former Soviet republics Belarus and Russia.
The index shows that in overall living standards, Ukraine is closer to Turk-menistan (103rd), Uzbekistan (104th), Albania (105th) and Georgia (108th).
Canada for the last five years has headed the ranking, compiled annually by the United Nations Development Program as part of its global Human Development Report.
The report uses life expectancy at birth, the ratio of citizens enrolled in education at all levels, adult literacy and ‘real’ gross domestic product per capita to evaluate the opportunity a country grants its population to live long, healthy lives, acquire knowledge and be able to use resources necessary for a decent standard of living.
According to the index, the opportunities available to Ukrainians are dwindling as Ukraine has slipped further and further down the list. In 1996 it was ranked 80th, in 1997, 95th.
Ukraine’s life expectancy, at 68, is 11 years lower than in Canada, while infant mortality stands at 24 per 1,000 live births, compared to seven in Canada. In 1990, Ukrainian life expectancy was 70, child mortality 12 per 1,000.
However, Ukraine’s mortality rates are still lower than in many countries that stand higher on the index, such as Russia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia, with life expectancies of 65, 67 and 64, respectively.
Ukraine’s literacy rating, at 98 percent adult literacy and 76 percent enrollment in all levels of education, is also higher than in almost all but the top 20 countries ranked above it.
It is in income that Ukraine really lags behind its neighbors. The percentage of the population living below the poverty line of $4 a day in Ukraine is 41, in neighboring Belarus, 23, and in Russia, 38.
Purchasing power in Ukraine is on a par with Cameroon and less than Papua New Guinea. It is half that of Belarus (ranked 68th in the index) and only about a third that of Luxembourg or Brunei, which top the list in terms of income and purchasing power.
The seemingly small gap in wealth between Luxembourgers and Ukrainians is arrived at by taking incomes and prices into account. Such comparisons tend to overemphasize basic foodstuffs and underestimate real gaps in living standards.
Also, the overall figures don’t tell the whole story. For example, although overall Russians are significantly better off than Ukrainians, that is largely because the spending power of the richest 20 percent of Russians is more than twice that of the richest 20 percent of Ukrainians. The poorest 20 percent of Russians, meanwhile, are nearly twice as poor as their Ukrainian counterparts.
Although Ukraine is classified as an industrialized country, it still ranks below many countries classified as developing, such as Botswana, Algeria and Guyana, whose populations are less healthy and less educated.
