It became known how the regions of the South have affected the country's economy since the beginning of the invasion

The intermediate results of changes in the regional economic structure after the outbreak of a full-scale war are now known. For the analysis, the researchers used budget data on personal income tax (PIT) revenues from wages to the budgets of regions and territorial communities for 2021 and 2023.

This was the subject of a study by the Top Lead agency.

The analysis of the distribution of "payroll PIT" between different budgets allows us to accurately assess the total amount of payments in each region and create a clear picture of economic activity at the territorial level.

As expected, the role of western cities has increased significantly. In particular, the share of Lviv in the economy has increased from 3% to 3.6% over the past two years. A significant increase in economic activity was also observed in Vinnytsia, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Lutsk, Ternopil, and Uzhhorod.

The trend of economic activity concentration in Kyiv continued: in 2023, the capital's enterprises paid a quarter of all wages in the country. However, the largest growth was recorded in Dnipro, whose share in the economy increased from 3.9% to 5.4%.

Screenshot: Top Lead

In the South of Ukraine, the situation is different. Thus, the share of Odesa region in the economy decreased from 3.0% to 2.9%. In general, the situation in the region is described as "virtually unchanged." In Mykolaiv region, a "moderate decrease" was recorded, with the share falling from 1.2% to 1.0%. In Kherson region, it dropped from 0.8% to 0.4, characterized as "strongly reduced" and "collapsed."

At the same time, the war did not prevent thousands of Ukraine's largest companies from achieving record revenues in 2022, which amounted to almost UAH 6 trillion, which is 20% more than in 2020 (no data for the previous year). However, the overall figures for the country do not give a complete picture of the distribution of economic activity across the regions. For example, the revenue of the 405 companies from Kyiv that make up the top 1000 totaled UAH 3.09 trillion, which is 100 billion more than the total revenue of all companies from other regions.

Screenshot: Top Lead

Thus, in Odesa region, the top five companies are as follows:

• Tedis Ukraine - UAH 64.95 billion;
• OOEK - UAH 11.24 billion;
• Tavria Plus - UAH 9.93 billion;
• Eurostandard - UAH 9.14 billion;
• Avtomagistral-Pivden - UAH 7.58 billion.

In Mykolaiv region:

• Nibulon - UAH 15.18 billion;
• Mykolaiv Electric Supply Company - UAH 5.79 billion;
• Technotorg-Don - UAH 5.17 billion;
• Technotorg - UAH 2.58 billion;
• Private Enterprise Zakhid - UAH 1.66 billion.

In Kherson region:

• Sada JSZ - UAH 0.20 billion;
• Diadema-Consulting - UAH 0.14 billion;
• Sodruzhestvo - UAH 0.13 billion;
• Adelaide - UAH 0.10 billion;
• Tavria Charitable Foundation - UAH 0.05 billion.

The net income of companies in Odesa region amounted to UAH 201.3 billion, in Mykolaiv region - UAH 47.2 billion, and in Kherson region - UAH 0.

The largest revenue growth was observed in the western regions, such as Lviv, Volyn and Rivne. Instead, businesses in the occupied and frontline territories of the south and east recorded a decline. However, even in cities such as Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Sumy, which are located near the frontline, the revenue of the top 5 companies increased despite the difficulties. However, these figures cannot be compared to the 50% growth in Lviv, Lutsk, Uzhhorod, or the twofold increase in Ivano-Frankivsk.

Most of the charters of Ukrainian companies are now publicly available and can be viewed in the format of scanned documents in real time. There are 854,000 charters of existing Ukrainian companies in the public domain, of which 98,000, or 11.5%, are model charters. In total, the charters of 61% of all registered companies are available on Opendatabot.

In the first eight months of 2024, more than 19,000 new entrepreneurs opened sole proprietorships in the south of the country. In total, almost 194 thousand new individual entrepreneurs have registered in Ukraine. Thus, 12839 sole proprietorships were opened in Odesa region, 5096 in Mykolaiv region, and 1746 in Kherson region.

One third of new sole proprietorships are opened in the trade sector, while the IT sector attracted 7.6% of new entrepreneurs. The third most popular is the provision of individual services - 7%.

Since the start of the full-scale war, foreigners from 101 countries have opened 3,075 companies in Ukraine. Citizens are the most likely to start a business in Ukraine: Turkey - 396 companies, Uzbekistan - 312 companies, and Poland - 224 companies.

Анна Бальчінос