UKRAINE has just released balance-of-payments data for August. In terms of Ukraine’s recent past, at least, it makes for good reading. Exports are rising and the country is running both current-account and budget surpluses. The reserves of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) are rising, and the finance ministry has a record $2.2 billion in its Treasury account. Pretty impressive.

The NBU reckons that by the fourth quarter of this year, the Ukrainian economy will be growing again (in dollar terms the economy has more than halved in size over the last year or so). This may be an optimistic forecast; things still look pretty terrible. The following chart shows industrial production, retail sales and exports (in American dollars), all of which are shown as a year-on-year change. Ukraine has moved away from the depths of economic despair of a few months ago, but they hardly look great:

Also I am not sure that Ukraine should boast too much about its twin surpluses. As Timothy Ash of Nomura, a bank, argues,

On the current-account side, the collapse in domestic demand and deep recession has slashed imports, more than making up for the collapse also in exports, particularly to Russia. So not sure how sustainable that is; as recovery grips, imports will rise again.

Then we have the budget surplus. Is it really sensible for a country in the middle of an economic crisis to be tightening its purse strings? It does suggest that some of Ukraine's structural reforms are going well. BVut the government is also depriving the economy of much-needed demand. It is largely being achieved by freezing civil-service salaries and pensions, which is not sustainable for long. As Mr Ash argues,