It is useful to set goals for the future, for countries as well as individuals. But similarly, it’s important for such goals to be realistic and achievable, otherwise the exercise will likely end in disappointment.
Ukraine set a range of goals in the “Ukraine 2020 Strategy” approved by President Petro Poroshenko in January 2015 in four key areas: development, security, responsibility and social justice, and pride.
Together, these four pillars include 62 reform projects, programs, and goals, eight priority reforms and two priority state programs that are intended to achieve Ukraine’s goal of making Ukraine “a country of European standards with a rightful place in the world.”
The goals themselves range from raising living standards, reforming the justice system, improving the health and education systems and promoting respect and tolerance in society.
But to carry out this package of reforms, Ukraine will have to push through sweeping legislation, such as overhauling the historically corrupt and politically subservient Prosecutor General’s Office.
The strategy sets 25 benchmarks, or key performance indicators, by which to gauge the progress of reform. The main indicator is simply described as creating “a new social contract between state, business and civil society.”
Still, the remaining 24 benchmarks give starting conditions and goals for Ukraine to achieve by 2020 in facts and figures.
An initial analysis of these indicators breaks them into categories of achievability: unlikely, possible, likely and “who knows?”
Who knows?
Four of the 24 benchmarks are difficult to assess in terms of achievability – they rely on surveys of public opinion or statistical measurements that are yet to be carried out. They include “experts’ confidence in the judiciary” for which the goal is “70 percent,” with no starting level of confidence indicated (although recent polls show confidence in law enforcement institutions to be in the single digits) and “public confidence in the police,” which is also supposed to hit 70 percent by 2020.
Another benchmark with a 70 percent goal is “Ukrainians’ pride in their country,” which is to be measured by national opinion polls.
Likely
The one key indicator that is likely to be achieved by 2020 is military spending as a percentage of gross domestic product.
From a starting point of 1 percent, Ukraine for the foreseeable future – since the onset of Russia’s war in 2014 – plans to spend 5 percent of annual GDP by 2020 on national defense.
Another factor is that Ukraine also aims to make its military “NATO ready” by 2020 – meeting standards that would make it eligible for alliance membership in future. Given that most of NATO’s 28 members have consistently failed to meet the alliance’s own goal that they devote 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending, Ukraine looks set to exceed this one benchmark.
Possible
Eleven of the 24 key indicators can be categorized as “possible.” Where independent forecasts are available, such as energy intensity of GDP (2020 goal: 0.2 kilogram of oil equivalent, per 2005-indexed dollar) and government deficit, percentage of GDP (2020 goal: 3 percent), the goals look to be within the range of possibility when compared to forecasts from the IMF and World Bank.
However, other goals, such as reducing Ukraine’s energy dependence on Russia, increasing local budgets to 65 percent of Ukraine’s public sector spending, and increasing Ukraine’s sovereign credit rating from today’s “B-“ to “BBB,” depend mainly on the actions of the government. These, in turn, are dependent on Ukraine’s political situation, which in turn can be dependent on external factors such as Russia’s war on Ukraine and the overall state of the global economy, which are outside of the government’s control.
Unlikely
The remaining eight benchmarks in Ukraine’s development strategy seem unlikely to be hit, based on independent forecasts, and the government’s own track record in past years.
For instance, Ukraine hopes to raise life expectancy from 71 in 2015 to 74 by 2020.
But according to the University of Denver’s Pardee Center for International Futures, which produces a range of development forecasts for countries around the world, Ukraine’s life expectancy by 2020 is more likely to have barely risen – to 71.67.
Raising life expectancy relies on improving such a broad range of influencing factors, from wages to lifestyle, health care and environmental conditions, that this benchmark looks unlikely to be hit, given the scant progress Ukraine has made in all of these areas in the recent past.
The same goes for the government’s ambitious goal of raising gross domestic product per capita (PPP) from about $8,500 in 2015 to $16,000 in 2020 – practically doubling it. According to a forecast by Trading Economics, an organization that tracks around 200 statistical indicators for 196 countries around the world, analysts actually expect Ukraine’s GDP per capita to go down, to about $7,800, by 2020.
And Poroshenko’s key goal of raising Ukraine’s World Bank Ease of Doing Business rating, at present at 80, to within the top 20 by 2020 also looks unlikely, says Trading Economics. The business and investment research organization, based on historical data and the expectations of analysts, sees Ukraine dropping back to a rating of 98 in the Ease of Doing Business ranking by 2020.
Hopes for the best
Fully half of the key benchmarks Ukraine has set out in its 2020 strategy are possible or likely to be hit. But the picture looks less rosy when considering that the other half of the key goals, which are unlikely to be achieved or for which it is impossible to predict an outcome, cover some key areas such as combatting corruption, raising living standards, and boosting the economy.
Nevertheless, before Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution and the outbreak of Russia’s aggressive war on the country, few would have predicted Ukraine would have made the progress it has done in the last two years, from defense reform to shaking up the notoriously corrupt state procurement system.
Hope for further progress in reform, to paraphrase the words of Ukraine’s national anthem, hasn’t perished yet.
