ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the entry and insertion of the second largest Eastern European state into world markets and explores the competing alternatives for its regional economic integration. The major phase of capitalist development took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Western finance and the Russian state jointly undertook industrialization and the commercialization of agriculture in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. The Soviet bloc broke up at a historical point in time when then steadily growing volume of world economic output was outstripping the capacity of the world’s population to pay for and consume this output. An important component of the strategy concerns trade: repositioning Ukraine's technologically advanced sectors for more effective competition on the world market, and prioritizing the country’s involvement in key regional markets and market regimes. Ukraine had the lowest rate of foreign direct investment on a per capita basis for all the transitional economies in the 1990s.
