ECONOMIC PROFILE FORMATION OF STRATEGICALLY IMPORTANT TYPES OF INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY IN UKRAINE (RETROSPECTIVE VIEW)

Abstract

The issues related to the reformatting of the economic profile of strategically important types of industrial activity in Ukraine in the pre-war period are analyzed, and the content of the changes that took place in 1995–2021 is revealed in comparison with the corresponding changes that are common with individual EU countries, specifically Germany, as one of the leaders in the European Economic Area as well as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Estonia, which went through a period of economic transformation from a dominant planned distribution system to a market one and, in the end, achieved success by becoming members of the European Union. Among the main results of the structural changes analysis in the economy of Ukraine and individual EU countries, the underdevelopment of the Ukrainian economy can be traced clearly in terms of the reduction of those types of industrial activity that form a relatively high share of added value, which causes the loss of competitive positions against the background of the countries under consideration. Thus, the reorganization of Ukrainian foreign trade in the direction of primitivization is taking place due to the dominance of the export of food products and raw materials for their production, as well as industrial products related to the extraction of mineral resources and their primary processing. At the same time, the share of commercial products with a higher added value share increased in imports, which led to the development of technological dependence and threats of deepening of further industry reformatting in the direction of its peripheralization. Based on the analysis of the positive and negative components of the industrial policy of post-war economic recovery and development, which were previously applied in certain countries of the world, as well as considering the presence in Ukraine of part of a high-tech nature industrial production, it is shown how it is possible to bypass the existing threats by performing the so-called “homework” to ensure the stability of the state's development using the available historical experience, including domestic one. This article is a certain summary of a development nature's retrospective analysis of strategically important types of industrial activity over the last 20 years. Author will define the view of the future in the forthcoming publication, scheduled for the end of 2023.