Economy review in October 2023. The revival of business loans

Since March 2022, the Centre for Economic Strategy (CES), together with the German Economic Team (GET), has been preparing monthly reviews of Ukraine’s economy during a full-scale war. All notes can be found under the link.

You can also access the visualization of monthly highlights through our regularly updated Ukraine War Economy Tracker.

The following happened in the Ukrainian economy in October:

• Macroeconomic trends: improvment of GDP growth, business expectations worsened.
  
• Industry overview: energy sector is stable so far, fаerrous production further decreased, grain exports by sea increased.
  
• Fiscal sector: Ukraine received USD 2.75 bn of foreign financing, tax revenues continue steady growth, defense spending more than doubled, local budgets surplus continues to be larger.
  
• Monetary and fx policy: international reserves declined and hryvnia strengthened, NBU cuts key policy rate to 16%, inflation slows down.

More details can be found in the presentation. Also, we added to the review a special topic — “The revival of business loans in Ukraine. Will this trend be sustained?”. Participants of the discussion:

• Andriy Gapon, Director of the Entrepreneurship Development Fund;
• Natalia Gurina, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Raiffeisen Bank Ukraine;
• Pervin Dadashova, Director of the Financial Stability Department of the National Bank of Ukraine;
• Yevhen Zaihraiev, Member of the Management Board of Privatbank for Small and Medium Business.