Украине прочат быстрый регресс населения

According to the International Labor Organization and the International Organization for Migration, their main destinations from 2010 to 2012 were Russia (43 percent), Poland (14 percent), Italy (13 percent) and the Czech Republic (13 percent). Over time, Ukrainian labor migration to Russia has been decreasing, and to the EU, increasing. The current conflict doubtless is accelerating that trend. The main source regions for labor migration are in the far West, meaning that—setting aside the huge refugee flows from the current conflict in the East—out-migration is a drain on the most demographically stable and healthy part of the country.

In 2012, private remittances from these workers, plus from the diaspora in North America, were equal to 4 percent of Ukraine’s GDP, exceeding net foreign direct investment. Ukraine is now the third-largest recipient of remittance payments in the world, after India and Mexico.

In sum, Ukraine’s human-capital dynamics severely constrain its potential for development, even abstracted from the immense costs of the current crisis. These facts must be faced squarely, including by Western governments seeking a rapid transformation of a “new Ukraine.” Ukraine’s inherited problems are much more daunting than those of East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, or of Poland, Hungary or other Eastern bloc countries when they escaped the Soviet yoke.

The country’s military mobilization capacity is limited for the long-term by the slump in the conscription pool, while the economy faces not only a shrinking and unhealthy labor force, but also mounting costs to support an aging population. Obviously, demographics do not exist in isolation, but they compound and complicate the resolution of other challenges, such as a dysfunctional political and legal system, environmental depredation, energy inefficiency (among the worst in the world), shabby and deteriorating infrastructure, wealth inequality (again, among the worst in the world), impending state debt restructuring and restoring an economy separated from many of its Eastern industries and coal mines. Threats to Ukraine’s geographic integrity tend to exacerbate its differential demographics that strongly favor the relatively young and healthy West.

For the past two decades, Ukraine’s political and economic elites have allowed critical problems of human capital to deteriorate, rather than to seek remediation of them. Efforts by new leaders and by Western sponsors to restore the unity of Ukraine must include improving the health of its population, West and East—a challenging, but necessary task.

Judy Twigg is Professor of Political Science at Virginia Commonwealth University.

E. Wayne Merry is Senior Fellow for Europe and Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraines-real-crisis-demographics-...