ICU has maintained its GDP growth forecast and improved its hryvnia exchange rate forecast for 2025.
This is stated in the report of the company, the Ukrainian News agency reports.
It is noted that the record current account deficit is one of the key long-term challenges for the economy, but in the medium term it will be completely covered by external assistance.
"Taking this into account, we slightly improve our exchange rate forecast to 42.4 UAH/USD (42.6 UAH/USD in the previous forecast - ed.) at the end of 2025 and 44.5 UAH/USD at the end of 2026. We are convinced that the growth of external imbalances (excluding external assistance) will still force the NBU to abandon the de facto fixed exchange rate and start a slow weakening of the hryvnia," the company said.
In terms of fiscal needs, the risks will be fully offset as long as the reparations loan remains a realistic scenario.
The downside of the loan is that russian assets were supposed to be used to finance Ukraine's post-war reconstruction.
However, the absence of alternative sources of funding today leaves no choice for Ukraine and the EU but to start using russian funds.
The GDP growth forecast for the current year has been maintained at 2.5%.
Next year, the economy may grow by 2.7%.
The company expects that inflation at the end of this year could be 8.5%, and next year - 7%.
As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, actual real GDP growth rates in the second quarter were lower than the National Bank's estimate, published in the July 2025 Inflation Report (1.1% yoy), primarily due to a more significant impact of adverse weather conditions on the ripening of crops, some of which carried over to the following quarters.
In the second quarter of 2025, real GDP grew by 0.7% in annualized terms (yoy), and by 0.2% in seasonally adjusted terms compared to the previous quarter.
At the same time, the annualized economic growth rate slowed down compared to the first quarter of 2025 (0.9% yoy).
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