Despite ongoing economic and political challenges, Ukraine has made significant progress since the 2016 SBA Assessment, through continuous implementation of reforms in such fields as deregulation, public procurement, harmonisation with the EU acquis and bankruptcy procedures, as well as improving its institutional and regulatory framework for SME policy and developing entrepreneurship key competence as part of its ambitious New Ukrainian School reform. In 2018, the SME Development Strategy until 2020 was adopted and the SME Development Office was established to support the Ministry for Development of Economy, Trade and Agriculture of Ukraine in implementing the strategy and expanding the infrastructure for SME support.

Ukraine’s legal definition of SMEs, introduced in 2012, remains unchanged. It defines micro, small and large enterprises based on employment and turnover criteria, which is broadly in line with the EU definition. When compiling statistics on SMEs, the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (Ukrstat) uses both the existing legal definition of SMEs and one based on employment only (State Statistics Service of Ukraine (Ukrstat), 2017[9]) to allow for comparability with EU countries.

In 2018, SMEs made up 99.8% of all enterprises in the business sector, 96% of them being microenterprises. SMEs accounted for 63% of the total business employment in Ukraine and generated 49% of value added in the business sector.

The majority of SMEs in Ukraine still operate in the wholesale and retail trade (51.4%) and thus remain concentrated in low-value-added sectors. However, recent years have seen a growing number of SMEs in the IT sector (9% in 2018 versus 5% in 2015).

Ukraine has made significant progress in competition policy, and competition law and enforcement now incorporate most of the relevant building blocks and practices of an effective competition law regime. The Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (AMCU) has most of the required powers and instruments at its disposal, and uses them for active enforcement against unlawful cartels, mergers, and abuses of dominance. The AMCU, being an autonomous and independent body, is authorised to compel undertakings to provide information for infringement investigations, conduct surprise on-site inspections (so-called “dawn raids”), apply financial penalties to all types of undertakings, offer remedies and block anticompetitive mergers.

Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/d5c2705e-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/d5c2705e-en