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Interview EBRD Regional Lead Economist Dimitar Bogov

Text: Diana Pavlenko

So Ukraine's GDP growth forecast for 2024 from the EBRD is more optimistic, due to updated REP, than the government, International monetary fund expectations. What growth factors do you rely on that can lead to these positive results?

I would say that most of the international institutions gravitate now around 3% growth for this year. For example, the last IMF press release from the fifth review stated 2.5 to 3.5%. So we are in the middle of that range, 3%. Therefore, we are in line with the views of other institutions for 2024.

But maybe we are a bit more optimistic for 2025, because we project 4.7%, GDP growth while other institutions are still a bit lower than that. We don't differ in the assumption about the war. We all assume that the war will continue with a similar intensity in the next year.

However, our view is that the energy situation will improve compared to this year. This year the economy suffers because of lack of electricity caused by large scale destruction that started in March and continued. There are a lot of efforts to improve this situation that will likely bring results next year. Also, recently EU announced more support to increase domestic capacities and more export of electricity to Ukraine. We expect that next year situation will be much better concerning electricity supply and it will have impact on domestic output.

At the same time, we already saw this year, Black Sea corridor is working for export of Ukrainian products, military production is taking traction and all this actually could materialize in better outcome next year.

Have EBRD included in forecast factor of external funding, and how Ukraine can improve