The influence of Ukraine on the dynamics of consumer goods prices in the world

Abstract

The war in Ukraine in 2022 significantly shook not only the Ukrainian economy, but also left a negative impression on the whole world. An increase in the level of hunger, a jump in prices, the introduction of restrictions on supplies, a change in approaches to foreign economic activity – similar headlines can be found more and more often, which indicates an increased interest and the need to analyze the impact of Ukraine on the dynamics of consumer goods prices in the world. Moreover, this war is the largest full-scale war in Europe since the Second World War. The work analyzed Ukraine's position on consumer goods markets, divided into 3 periods, for each of which the structure of export and import, their dynamics, and key features of Ukraine's foreign economic activity at that time were characterized. To visualize data on the dynamics of prices for consumer goods in the world, the Global Food Prices Database dataset was processed, followed by the creation of consolidated tables and construction of histograms with grouping, which revealed the main trends in price changes for the main categories of products. A dataset of 105 countries was also created and processed, with their distribution into the main world regions: Asia-Pacific and Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and North America. Self-organizing maps and clustering models made it possible to identify 5 clusters, each of which corresponds to a set of countries with similar characteristics regarding the impact of the war in Ukraine on these countries. Four quantitative variables were used for clustering: average salary, GDP per capita, price index, % of imports from Ukraine.