International Economic Policy (Feb 2005)
Ukraine’s Economic Transformation in Western Academic Literature: A Selective Review
Abstract
This article provides a limited and selective review of the academic literature on Ukraine’s economic transformation, specifically 1) recapping what have been the major trends in this research; 2) what has been learned; and, 3) what is still useful to investigate in a future research agenda. From a metaanalysis one can draw quite a few optimistic conclusions. First, Ukraine as a laboratory for academic analysis in the received paradigm of the economics discipline using state of the art meth odology, attracting solid scholars, both established and recent PhDs, is on a strong footing, and very much on the radarscreen of the Anglophone profession. Inasmuch as most European economists with global ambition invariably publish much of their work in English, this means that the interest in Ukraine is global, or at least in the North Atlantic sphere. Second, the vast majority of the researchers in this sample are not Ukrainian specialists but economists with a current interest in Ukraine, which suggest that while they may move on, others will replace them. Third, the majority of researchers are neither from Ukraine nor of the diaspora, again suggesting that there is an appetite by outsiders to do academic work on Ukraine. It concludes with a ten point research agenda that highlights in particular the rich potential of re search on Ukraine’s economic transformation with the pas sage of time and increased availability of data, the valuable contribution to be made by Ukrainian economists and scholars, the need for focused monographs on the de velopment of oligarchs in Ukraine, and the merit of more studies on land privatization, among others.
