However war ends, Ukraine's diminished population will hit economy for
years
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[July 07, 2023] By
Olena Harmash
KYIV (Reuters) - With war dragging on, some of Ukraine's millions of
refugees are beginning to think about settling for good in the countries
they find themselves in across Europe, posing a challenge to rebuilding
the economy when the guns finally fall silent.
Natalka Korzh, 52, a TV director and mother-of-two, left behind a
newly-built dream house when she escaped the rockets falling on Kyiv in
the early days of the war. She is only just finding her feet in
Portugal, and doesn't plan on packing up her life again even when
fighting stops in Ukraine.
"Now, at 52, I have to start from scratch", said Korzh, who wants to
open a charity in Portugal to help other migrants in the town of Lagoa,
which she now calls home.
Studies by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR show the vast
majority of displaced Ukrainians want to return one day, but only around
one in ten plan to do so soon. In previous refugee crises, for example
in Syria, refugees' desire to return home has faded with time, UNHCR
studies show.
Reuters spoke to four company bosses who said they are now grappling
with the likelihood that many refugees will not return and that the
workforce will keep shrinking for years to come, a situation also
worrying demographers and the government.
Volodymyr Kostiuk, CEO of Farmak, one of Ukraine's top pharmaceutical
companies, with nearly 3,000 employees and over 7 billion hryvnias ($200
million) in revenue the year before the war, said with so many people
abroad, displaced within Ukraine or drafted into the armed forces he was
facing a shortage in qualified laboratory workers and production
specialists.
"We need to somehow try to return them to Ukraine, because we already
see that the longer people are abroad, the less they want to return",
said Kostiuk, whose company relocated its research lab and staff to
Kyiv, from close to the front line.
A poll of about 500 businesses in Ukraine carried out by Ukrainian
think-tank the Institute for Economic Research and Political Studies
showed that a third saw staff shortages as a key challenge.
Conscription-aged men are restricted from leaving Ukraine, so
working-aged women, and children, make up the majority of refugees.
While farms and factories have lost workers to the armed forces, labour
shortages are especially acute in industries requiring higher levels of
education and training because educated young women are among those most
likely to have left the country since the war started in February 2024.
Two thirds of the women who sought refuge elsewhere in Europe have a
higher education, according to research published in March by Ukrainian
think-tank the Centre for Economic Strategy.
It's not just a lack of labour, a shrinking workforce also dents
consumer demand over the long term.
Fozzy Group, which operates leading supermarket chains, reopened stores
in areas around Kyiv following Russia's retreat from the region in the
first few months of fighting. But footfall is still low, said Dmytro
Tsygankov, a Fozzy director in charge of new product lines.
"We cannot talk about recovery when we have several million people who
simply do not buy anything: they are not in the country", said Tsygankov.
He said client visits were up in May compared to last year, but still
16% below May 2021, before the invasion.
WILL THE MEN LEAVE?
Ukraine's population problem goes beyond millions of refugees. A high
proportion of citizens are elderly, and the country's fertility rate,
already one of the lowest in the world, is believed to have fallen to
0.7 from 0.9 since war broke out, said Ella Libanova, one of the
country's most respected demographers, at the National Academy of
Science.
A million people are fighting the Russians, millions more live in
territory seized by Moscow or have been displaced to Russia. The
Ukrainian government does not release casualty figures, but in April
leaked U.S. intelligence assessments said 15,000 working age men had
been killed or wounded. Many more are injured.
[to top of second column] |
Ksenia Karpenko, a 33-year-old Ukrainian
fashion designer from Kyiv, places one of her creations which
represents Ukraine's national culture, in Madrid, Spain, June 23,
2023. REUTERS/Juan Medina
Libanova also warned that once wartime restrictions on men leaving
the country were lifted many could join families abroad.
"A huge risk is that men will leave," she said. "We will lose young,
qualified, enterprising, educated people. That is the problem".
With Russia now occupying about a fifth of the country's territory,
Libanova estimates the population in areas controlled by Kyiv could
already be as low as 28 million, down from a government estimate of
41 million before the Feb. 24, 2022 invasion. The estimates exclude
Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, which had around 2 million people
at the start of that year.
Even before the war, Ukraine's population was shrinking.
At independence in 1991, Ukraine had about 52 million people. A
census in 2001 - the country's only so far - recorded a population
of 48.5 million.
Depending on how long the fighting lasts, and how many people settle
abroad, Ukraine's population is set to decline further by between
about a fifth and a third over the next 30 years, according a study
published in March by the European Commission's Joint Research
Centre.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
The government has not published figures for the current population,
and even the best estimates allow a large margin of error to account
for uncertainty about how many people are in Russia, Belarus and
Russian-held territory.
Demographer Libanova estimated the population at between 28 million
and 34 million at the start of 2023 in parts of the country
controlled by Kyiv.
The Center for Economic Strategy estimated that between 860,000 and
2.7 million Ukrainians may remain abroad for good, based on a poll
in February of more than a 1,000 refugees in EU countries. As a
result, the economy could lose 2.55%-7.71% of its GDP per year, it
said.
Farmak CEO Kostiuk said some of his staff work remotely and that
less than 5% of his employees had left and stayed abroad.
But, he worries about a growing shortage of specialized workers, in
part because young graduates lack practical skills after studying
remotely through the pandemic and invasion.
The government is more optimistic about returnees, citing the
patriotism that surged after the invasion. Oleksiy Sobolev, deputy
economy minister, told a recent roundtable he expected up to 75% of
refugees would head back to Ukraine within three years of the end of
fighting.
Some Ukrainians overseas are supporting the economy remotely.
Fashion designer Ksenia Karpenko has kept her business afloat from
her current home in Tarragona on the Mediterranean coast in Spain,
where she was on vacation when the war broke out.
"I was a tourist on February 23 and when I woke up (the next day)
... I was a refugee", Karpenko told Reuters.
She had to downsize but kept going despite the war and now manages a
team of eight people in Ukraine to design and make clothes sold in
boutiques in Madrid and Barcelona.
"I'm more effective here rather than in Ukraine. I do more here for
my compatriots as well", she said.
(Additional reporting by Corina Rodriguez in Madrid and Catarina
Demony in Lisbon; Editing by Mike Collett-White and Frank Jack
Daniel)
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