Analytical Tools for Community Recovery and Economic Development

On 7 March 2024, the Expert Session of the Mayors’ Club was held on the topic: “Analytical tools for the recovery and economic development of communities”

The speakers were: Mykhailo Leichenko, STO of the Innovation Development Centre; and Kateryna Ivanchenko, CEO of the Innovation Development Centre and co-developer of the Economic Profile.

The Innovation Development Centre has been helping local governments for more than 8 years. For 5 years, they have been developing various innovative tools and systems for the transition to data-driven governance. When the first territorial communities began to be created, the question arose:
“How can a community exercise its powers without having real data on what it has on its territory?” This applies to assets, businesses, activities, and taxpayers who fill the budget.

Without the tools, it is impossible to create a high-quality strategic document and receive revenues to the local budget, to promote development. In 2017, together with the communities, we started looking for effective tools that would help implement data analysis.

The main goal of the Centre for Innovation Development is to restore Ukraine’s economy and develop it in the future. That is why the Club of Mayors invited them to speak and plans to cooperate closely. In turn, economic development is impossible without cooperation with private business, which is a budget-forming component.

The Innovation Development Centre has developed the Economic Profile of the community – a unified data system and visualised analytics on the community’s economy based on data from more than 100 sources and state registers.

The speakers also actively discussed the topic of business relocation in Ukraine. The factors were: security factor and support for business and its staff from the community. The issue of community support for business sparked lively discussions among the participants of the expert session, which concluded that it is not about budgetary funding, but about possible sets of measures from the community that can facilitate the work of business in that community. Everyone understands how important it is to receive taxes during the war, and the community may have the tools to help improve these indicators.

Several real-life cases in Ukraine were discussed and presented, including the analytics of “white spots on the ground” for which no taxes are paid but which are actively used, and cities that are effectively digitalised with the help of the Economic Profile. An example was given with interesting statistics for 2020-2022, about the analytics of new business registration in Ukraine. The statistics showed that businesses were more actively registering during the war compared to the pandemic. They also discussed the environmental issue, which concerned the map of fires in agricultural fields, which could help to introduce penalties and stop the dangerous actions of arsonists.

Regarding the systematisation of taxpayers: An information map of Ukraine was developed on the various sources of information used as analytics for both the community and business. As a result of data analytics, cases of improvement of the tax payment situation in communities were presented. Data-driven governance and analysis is important because governing bodies will not be able to disregard this information as producing real results.

The Economic Profile can be customised to suit the community. Access to data will help analyse business intelligence information and contribute to the development of Ukraine’s economy, starting with each individual community.