Innovative countries fight the pandemic more efficiently, but Ukraine is not one of them, according to U.S. media company Bloomberg.
Ukraine ranks 58th among the world’s 60 most innovative economies, above Algeria and below Tunisia, according to 2021 Bloomberg Innovation Index.
Over the year, Ukraine has become less innovative. In 2020, the country was in 56th place, in 2019 — in 53d, in 2018 — in 46th.
For the ninth consecutive year, Bloomberg has collected data from over 200 global economies and scored them on a 0-100 scale in seven categories, including the quality of higher education in the country, spending on research and development (R&D) centers, and the number of public tech companies per capita. In the 2021 report, Ukraine has 47.5 points, meaning that the country’s achievements in these fields are insufficient. For reference, the U.S. has a score of 83.6.
Ukraine’s neighboring countries like Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania showed better results. Poland, for example, gained two points and now ranks 23d, followed by Russia that also became more innovative last year, according to Bloomberg.
Bloomberg also said that the countries that top the ranking, including South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland and Germany, fight the pandemic more efficiently. For example, South Korea and Germany use technologies to trace patients infected with the coronavirus and lead the race to adopt the vaccine.
During the pandemic, Ukraine also wanted to introduce contact tracing but has only developed an app called Diy Vdoma that monitors people on self-isolation. Many people avoid using this app, some Ukrainians don’t even have a smartphone to install it.
Although Ukraine has a developed tech sector that employes over 182,000 skilled techies and brings $5 billion in exports a year, the country lacks a proper judicial system and legislation and has low purchasing power, which means local tech firms have to sell their products and services abroad, to where there’s a demand.
Even the startups founded in Ukraine — innovative tech companies that attracted $570 million of investment last year — register their legal entities in Europe or the U.S. to make it easier to attract investment money and to sell their goods and services there.
Ukrainian government tries to change that. It launched the Ukrainian Startup Fund to give money to budding startups and created a new ministry responsible for the regulation of information technologies, the Digital Transformation Ministry. These efforts, however, haven’t produced the expected results yet.
“Innovation is often measured by new ideas, new products and new services,” said Catherine Mann, chief economist at U.S. bank Citigroup. But it is the “diffusion and adoption” of these ideas and services that really measures the countries success, she told Bloomberg on Feb. 3.
