Economic comparison: Ukraine vs Russia. Real GDP per head in Ukraine is still below the 1989 level. Russia doubled the GDP per head

In 2014, we compared the evolution of real GDP per head in Russia and Ukraine since 1980. The Total Economy Database (TED) of the Conference Board was used. In this post, we revisit our estimates from 2014 with a new dataset – now TED is replaced by the Maddison Project Database (MPD). Three figures below present different sides of the relative evolution. The upper figure shows the absolute GDP per capita values since 1980, and the Russia curve is still much above Ukraine. In 2018, Russia had $24,669 (2011 prices) and Ukraine only $9,813. The growth is absent in Ukraine since 2008 and the level observed in 1989 ($10,082) has to be reached in the future. The middle (both curves normalized to 1980) and lower (both curves normalized to 1991) figures show that the real GDP per capita in Russia is by a factor of 2.05 larger in 2018 than in 1991 and by a factor of 2.01 compared to 1980. The actual problem is that this lag is forever.