Ukraine is faced with a choice that will determine its future: to remain trapped in a resource economy or to transform into a complex, highly developed structure. The first option is the path of degradation of industry, infrastructure and labor export, while the second is GDP growth, investment in education, science, medicine and the new industrial Renaissance. However, will political will be enough for the transition to the development model, will the simple but devastating path be selected again? Analytik Alexei Kush told about it.
Discussion of the model of use of Ukrainian resources is at the same time discussing the model of economic development as a whole. Either the "economy of resource exploitation", or a model of economic transformation towards a new, more complex and more developed structure.
In simple words, to live at the expense of a scanty raw material (larger no one will pay) or at the expense of additional value.
In the first case, further export of the population to other, more developed countries. Degradation of industrial metropolitan areas of the East and the Center. Deindustrialization and desocialization. Infrastructure degradation, education, medicine and science. Low levels of pollicular income, GDP and investment deficiency in defense. Ecology problems.
In the second - an increase in productivity, investment in science, education, medicine, infrastructure. Creating jobs. New Industrialization and Urbanization Renaissance. GDP growth and income levels, significant costs of defense, energy, ecology. Demand for highly skilled labor, repatriation of the population.
For all the obvious advantages of the second option, the choice is likely to be made in favor of the first.
I give the chances as 70/30. And you know why?
There are two reasons.
The first is simplicity. Our elites always go the way that seems simple. What this then leads to difficult problems is another question.
The second reason is rento orientation.
Rento -oriented political elites always choose an rent, raw material, corruption model of the economy, which enables them to withdraw from it "passive income" as from a bank deposit.
A complex economy requires the availability of "developer elites", country billing, "elite development" that earn part of the profit generated by the system, not part of the rent.
