How Transcarpathia trades with the world (Infographic)

The media department of Uzhgorod Press Club, presented the infographic "How Transcarpathia trades with the world" (auth.  A. Semenyuk, Ya Denysyuk) created under the project with the support of the Media Foundation of the US Embassy in Ukraine.

The geographical position of Transcarpathia has a strong effect on economic activity in our region. The borders with several EU member states contributes to growth of both imports and exports of goods.

On the site of the State Statistics Service in Transcarpathian region, we found the data that characterize the foreign economic activity in Transcarpathia since 1996.

As we can see in the first graph, after the collapse of the USSR, we did not fare too well and volumes of exports and imports were not significant, though gradually growing.

A dramatic rise, especially in imports, took place in 2004. This may be due to several factors: the overall growth of the world economy at that time and our neighbors joining the EU.  However, in 2008, the global economic crisis shook the world, the consequences of which are reflected in the graph as the drop of exports and imports in 2009.  Later, these indicators increased, but after 2013, probably because of revolutionary events in Ukraine, they began to go down again and recently there has been a negative trend.

Also in a separate graph, we showed the difference between the trade with the CIS countries and that with the EU.It clearly shows that the CIS has never been a big trading partner of Transcarpathia, and after the events of the Maidan it became insignificant. However, in recent years, imports from the EU have also reduced. They reached their peak in the crisis year 2008 – more than USD 1,553 million.